I’ve been using Japanese in Mangaland as a text and also did the workbook exercises. But there’s a whole chapter on onomatopoeia and I find it really boring. I read somewhere that Japanese use onomatopoeia a lot, is it ok to skip it?
My main goal is not to take the exams but really to watch anime and read manga.
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Learn vocabulary (roughly) by frequency, not by category. If a word keeps coming up again and again then you need to know it (including onomatopoeia), if not then not.
Its common. In th end, they’re just words, you can learn them while you watch.
you can skip anything you like, but onomotopoeia is WAY more common in japanese than it is in english, you’ll be stunting your understanding if you ignore an entire classification of words
Japanese uses a lot of onomatopoeias, you’ll come across it a LOT in anime and manga
I was thinking you can skip it, then I read “main goal…anime and read manga.”
Onomatopoeia in Japanese isn’t like how it is in English. For us it means words like bang, crash but in Japan they it seems like they have words for almost everything. If you skip it you’ll be missing out on a big chunk of vocab and specifically the kind that’s more likely to turn up in anime then IRL speech.
Of course you can skip it, just you might get muzumuzusowasowa when a native perapera speaks to you and you’d become haraharadokidoki when they dobadoba onomatopoeias into you as you fail to understand.
I say skip it
Skipping onomontopia in general is like shooting yourself in the foot. Skipping onomontopia when you want to dive into anime/manga is like shooting yourself in both feet and hands.
Yeah, i’d say skip it. They’re really hard to learn out of context and in context you can often understand even if you haven’t deliberately memorized them
People use onomotopoeia as verbs and adjectives frequently, you should learn them just like any other words.
I look them up in the dictionary but I’m way less likely to add one to anki than a verb or noun.
> my goal is to read manga
> wants to skip onomatopoeia
If your main goal is to take exams I would skip it.
If you main goal is to watch anime and read manga I would say skipping it is a bad idea.
Onomatopoeia is just like vocab in Japanese, so maybe you should consider studying it
Don’t get hung up on it being called “onomatopoeia”, that’s makes it sound way more useless than it actually is
As others have said, onomatopoeia is used far more extensively in Japanese than it is in English, both in media and in real life conversations. That said, (1) I advise against skipping that chapter—especially if you’re using it for anime and manga, and (2) Japanese onomatopoeia isn’t actually that much different from learning any other vocabulary word.
I’d skip that chapter, at least studying it hardcore, but make sure you’re aware of it when you’re watching things and especially when you’re reading. The amount of どくんs I’ve seen while readings or (insert onotmatopoea)という used in description makes it very hard to read without knowing it.
I would say if you find them boring in a textbook setting but plan on reading a bunch of manga, it’s fine to skip for now, and look them up in context as you read them later. I found them pretty hard to remember in isolation relative to other vocab, and easier to pick up based on context clues, so while they are important vocab, I think you could put them off until you get exposed through native material.
No, it’s common in Japanese to use onomatopoeia, why would I skip it
You’re going to find actual onomatopoeia like シーン, ガーン, ドーン, ダダダダダ, ドッカン, ピチューン, ポン, etc. There are also a ton of onomatopoeic and mimetic words used relatively often, like バッチリ, スパッと, スッキリ, ばったり, がっかり, ぷくり, ばっと, ふわふわ, ふらふら, モフモフ, ガリガリ, ゴロゴロ, コロコロ, じっと, ボコボコ, etc.
You won’t be able to avoid them, period.
Lol to be honest, I just had to search what the word even was…
Although they do use it a lot, I did not “study” it per say…I learned it (still am, also close to jlpt n1) through just exposure, yes by reading manga, but mainly by reading light novels..
If your main purpose is to consume content (thats my main goal too), you are more than ok skipping actually “studying” it and just learning it as you get more input
>I read somewhere that Japanese use onomatopoeia a lot
Yes.
>is it ok to skip it?
No. Well, you could probably skip the chapter as long as you make sure to learn the common onomatopoeia words and do not neglect them.
>My main goal is not to take the exams but really to watch anime and read manga.
Especially not for manga.
onomatopoeias are literally a part of the language and are used as commonly as everything else (as long it’s not a formal setting). Just treat them like vocabulary words.
They’re pretty easy to memorize cause they tend to repeat themselves and usually have some sort of explanation that goes with them despite most of the explanations being a Bikram yoga stretch of what it’s actually supposed to mean.
I say learn them, but take your time. Like one or two a day, and pick the ones you see the most or that are the most useful for you.
Manga and anime might be the most relevant place for onomatopoeia. You could probably do it if you just wanted to do the exams.
i never really studied an onomatopoeia, i think it’s fine to skip them because they’re fairly easy to just pick up while immersing imo
Do not skip it. I didn’t bother learning many of them when I was in uni and now it genuinely feels like my Japanese is stunted. They are really commonly used in Japanese, way more than English.
You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, feel free to skip it for now if you want. However onomatopoeia in Japanese are used a LOT more than you’d think as an English speaker including tons of times when they aren’t actually making any sound.
For example, one of the first ones I learned was “Boroboro”, meaning something that is worn down, tattered, etc. You might see this appear in the middle of an innocuous sentence, something like “彼女はボロボロの本を持っています” (English: she has a tattered book). The book here is not literally making a sound effect, the “boroboro” is being used as a standard descriptor like any other descriptive noun even though technically it comes from an onomatopoeia. If you don’t know the meaning behind the onomatopoeia you probably can’t piece it out by sound, you kind of have to know it like any other vocabulary word.
IMO onomatopoeia are good vocabulary that might be easier to remember by their distinct sound effect. In manga or anime you might see some being used as literal sound effects (like a comic book “Bang!” or “Pow!”), and these should be self apparent without deeper study. But you’ll also see a lot used as descriptive words in conversation or otherwise that are worth learning in their own right.
One of the things I find most charming about Japanese is the heavy use of onomatopoeia. It would be a shame to skip this.
It’s a bad idea. I think we westerners often think the onomatopoeia are Japanese people trying to be cute or it being really colloquial. But in reality they are just words to describe abstract feelings/impressions and they are very common in all walks of life. When I was fresh off the boat I was so bewildered hearing them during a big business meeting.
In the end not learning onomatopoeia is like saying you refuse to use adverbs of evaluation. You can get by without, but what would be the point?
why would you skip the thing that manga uses 90% of the time?
I’ve seen semi-joking posts about how there’s multiple levels to understanding Japanese where they put onomatopoeia as the final level, even after learning stuff like how to read most name-usage kanji, the 2000 or however many most common kanji, and understanding the difference between は and が. Onomatopoeia appears all the time and idk if it is ever “sensical” in English but it hardly ever seems to make sense in Japanese. Why is ペラペラ an onomatopoeia meaning “fluent” (probably has other meanings too but I haven’t studied onomatopoeia either lmaoo) and why does that sound make Japanese people think “that’s what should represent being good at a language”?
Onomatopoeia in Japanese are one of my favorite things. Also I really like reading them in manga.
You can also figure a lot of them out as you go. But I feel (no backup) that it’s used a lot in dialogue as well.