What manga are you reading?

[Ponyfan]

I just finished Sailor Moon volumes 1-3.

Ponyfan

[Haruna]

Cool! Are you still reading the series? Right now I'm re-reading Ouran and intermittently reading a few others -- Honey So Sweet (highly recommend!), Nisekoi, and Kamisama Kiss. When the next volume comes out, I'll be reading Kimi ni Todoke. (As you can see I mostly like to read shoujou manga and lean towards romantic comedy.) I was rereading Dengeki Daisy and occasionally Otomen recently.

[Ponyfan]

I'm up to Volume 4 of Sailor Moon. All of those you mention sound really interesting.

Ponyfan

[Firehooves]

Fruits basket, Inu Yasha, and Azumanga Daioh

[Annie]

Haven't read a manga in ages! I miss it. I find it so hard to start up a new manga so usually I just re-read my old favorites.
I recommend "Red River" or "Anatolia Story" as it's also called"- A time-traveling, magical, romantic adventure.

[True]

I tend to like the dark/horror/gore type mangas xD
I am currently reading Tokyo Ghoul!
It's actually the first manga I've started collecting, previously I just checked things out from the library. :p

[Taffeta]

I haven't read manga in ages, because it's a hassle getting it in Japanese and I don't have the space to store it. The last manga I read was Kakumei no hi after it came up in an academic talk at my university, but otherwise I really haven't for a long time.

I used to read and translate Bleach manga for a community but that manga ended up such a train wreck that I haven't been back to it in a long time.

I was reading Harukanaru Toki no Naka De 5 but then it got dropped and I haven't begun on Haruka 6 yet because really I would rather read Haruka 5 manga. :/

So now I'm really just left with my manga kids' history books that I brought back from Japan which relate to my research. Kind of depressing really. I do love manga. I just have no space.

Furuba (Fruits Basket) was one of the first manga I read, ten years or so ago? For some reason I have some volumes in English, some in French and some in Japanese.

Oh, I know a manga I will be reading/would be reading if the mangaka recovers and gets back to writing it. Saiyuuki. Saiyuuki Reload Blast, to be accurate. I love Saiyuuki, <3. But its poor creator is ill so often that it's constantly on hiatus.

[Lady Frostbite]

Oh, man! Here is where I declare myself fujoshi trash again  I usually read things that fall into the yaoi umbrella, but do branch out sometimes. My current reading list of active manga are :

• Kiss Him, Not Me! by Junko
• World’s Greatest First Love by Shungiki Nakamura
• Love Stage!! by Eiki Eiki and Taishi Zaou
• Ten Count by Rihito Takarai
• Kurashina-Sensei’s Passion by Natsuho Shino
• Loveless by Yun Kouga (I THINK, I heard Vol.13 was released in Japan but who knows by this point?)
• (Pre-Order) High School life of a Fudanshi by Michinoku Atami
• Awkward Silence by Hinako Takanaga (Vol.6 will be the last  )
• The Tyrant Falls In Love by Hinako Takanaga (there's one more volume to come about the side couple)
• Viewfinder series by Ayano Yamane
• Crimson Spell by Ayano Yamane

I have Don't be Cruel but haven't settled to read it properly. I recently got Haikyuu! but again it's sitting on my pile waiting to be read. Most of my collection is sadly in storage ... Sooooooo many titles that are finished (or stopped) that I need to give a proper read through.

[Haruna]

It makes me happy to see other people read manga I don't know many people IRL who do! It's such a beautiful storytelling form.

@Taffeta, I think it's awesome that you can actually translate the manga, too. I know one Japanese character, the hiragana one they use for "no," since it's so distinctive. Yay me I feel proud whenever I can find it, lol.

[Taffeta]

@Taffeta, I think it's awesome that you can actually translate the manga, too. I know one Japanese character, the hiragana one they use for "no," since it's so distinctive. Yay me I feel proud whenever I can find it, lol.

Ｙｏｕ mean this one の? It is cute
I also like the 'a', because you can do silly faces with it like : あ。あ

...ahem, just destroyed your image of me as a translator >.>

I got roped into doing it basically because the fan scanlations of Bleach were being done  by a group who were simply rewriting bits and I was in a community of people who wanted to analyse every actual detail, not read a ton of swear words added in to juice up the fights. Bleach is/was a manga full of tons of easter egg type symbolism and clues to old Japan and stuff hidden underneath all the typical fight scenes, and so people wanted to know the specifics so they could discuss what those things meant and what they foreshadowed. Unfortunately the final arc, though still full of those things, no longer foreshadowed anything because it was a rushed finish that didn't answer most of the outstanding issues and killed off a character in a way that actually contradicts itself. That happened to be my favourite character, so yeah, I lost interest in the manga...

But yeah, translating manga is actually fun because it's not translating great blocks of text, just dialogue, so it doesn't take that long and is a bit of a brain break. And it is sometimes written in regional dialect or slang, but not in 500 year old Japanese grammar or stiff academic modern Japanese, which is what I mostly deal with for my PhD work -.-. So from that point of view I miss doing it :/. I do miss Bleach, but I miss it how it was, not how it ended up :/. It's literally the only globally super-mainstream shounen manga I have ever been a fan of, but the last arc ruined it. Sad times :/.

Japanese character babble in spoiler tags.

Spoiler

木　林　森
These are the only Japanese characters my mother can get her head around. The first one is tree (ki).
The second one is copse (hayashi)
The third one is forest (mori)
The bigger the gathering of trees, the more trees in the character I wish all kanji were that logical -.-.

I taught my support advisor at university the horse kanji because she had to see my work so much (which relates to horses and representation of warriors). It's meant to be a horse turning it's head back. I dunno if I see it...

馬

My personal pet character though is the one for dream, because it looks like someone asleep in bed...
夢

I love manga, but from the manga/anime I've seen that talks about manga creation, I think it would be a really sucky job. So many mangaka end up ill with stress and overwork because of the deadlines.

[Haruna]

You mean this one の? It is cute

Yes, that's the one! My favorite character, lol

I got roped into doing it basically because the fan scanlations of Bleach were being done  by a group who were simply rewriting bits and I was in a community of people who wanted to analyse every actual detail, not read a ton of swear words added in to juice up the fights.

I can sympathize; I really don't like it when translators take too many liberties and mess up the manga or anime. It happens way too often! In manga I never get to see the original wording (not that I could read it if I could), but in anime it's a pet peeve of mine. I can understand a bit of Japanese when I hear it, and my sister comprehends even more, so when we watch anime together in Japanese with subtitles, sometimes we look at each other and are like, "Wait, that character just said 'I won't forgive you,' right, not 'You *$%%#$*' " (to give an extreme example).

I taught my support advisor at university the horse kanji because she had to see my work so much (which relates to horses and representation of warriors). It's meant to be a horse turning it's head back. I dunno if I see it...
馬

To me it kind of looks like a little square animal with five legs (four tiny ones and a curved front one)

[Ponyfan]

Thanks everyone. Sailor Moon is my first experience reading manga and now I know the Beauty and the Beast tie in manga I saw looked backwards.  I'm reading the Sailor Moon manga that's translated in to English since I can't read Japanese.  Taffeta I think that's amazing that you can translate manga from Japanese.

Ponyfan

[Taffeta]

I can sympathize; I really don't like it when translators take too many liberties and mess up the manga or anime. It happens way too often! In manga I never get to see the original wording (not that I could read it if I could), but in anime it's a pet peeve of mine. I can understand a bit of Japanese when I hear it, and my sister comprehends even more, so when we watch anime together in Japanese with subtitles, sometimes we look at each other and are like, "Wait, that character just said 'I won't forgive you,' right, not 'You *$%%#$*' " (to give an extreme example).

That's why I don't read manga in English. I'm not a manga snob, I don't have any issue with people reading or buying manga in English, nor do I think that it's at all superior to read it in Japanese. I read it in Japanese only because I am a detail geek and these days, having seen what people do to the original manga (some scanlations get translated from Japanese into Chinese and then into English O.o) I became really suspicious of (especially unofficial fan) translations. Bleach was super-bad for this, though. I think a lot of less mainstream manga (and especially shoujo type manga) have better translations, but there was such a rush to get the Bleach chapters translated first that people either made mistakes or generalised and you'd find a character suddenly being related to his best friend or jumping divisions from 13 to 3. And those were just the people who weren't trying to make themselves epic by rewriting the dialogue with curse words and cringeworthy slang.

With Bleach, while it ran, I generally preferred the anime because even though there were scenes missing and filler arcs, the manga scenes that appeared were almost totally exact to the original dialogue in the manga, and I liked that. As you say, too, it gives you the chance to know if there's a mistake, as the original dialogue is there and most people who watch anime are familiar with enough Japanese to pick out stuff like you just said. Fans are smart and not easily fooled.

Official translations at least are less likely to insert gratuitous swearwords though I admit I still haven't forgiven the official translation of one of my pet manga series turning an onmyouji into a 'sorcerer' and the name Sefuru into "Sefle". So glad that the anime version never got dubbed, that's all I'm going to say.

@Ponyfan, manga is fine in any language. So long as the people translating do a good job, no reason why you shouldn't enjoy it in English and Sailor Moon is a classic xD though it does take some getting used to, reading from what we think of as the back to the front.

I totally think that, if you're going to go down the manga path, ones mentioned above such as Fruits Basket and Ouran Host Club are a lot of fun xD. Fruits Basket (some people also call it Furuba) is really lovely. Sad in places, but really lovely. And Ouran is funny and pokes fun at itself as well, which is nice. Although I have a feeling that's a really long manga, isn't it? Furuba is about 23 volumes or something, but I think Ouran is longer than that?

I was actually inspired to learn Japanese from a series called Fushigi Yuugi. It all had to do with a friend linking me a music video on youtube for one of Tasuki's songs in Japanese, and it got so stuck in my head that then I wanted to know the words.

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hTbjR6rym0
if you are curious

So I began watching the anime on youtube. And then one ep was in English and it sounded horrible after so many in Japanese. And the manga in English used Chinese names for things where the anime used the Japanese pronunciation, and it was confusing. So then I decided to learn Japanese (as you do >.>).

Yuugi was a bit brutal in places, and now the anime is pretty old really. But I really still have a super soft spot for it. It depends on how you feel about characters you like dying.

[Ponyfan]

I finished Sailor Moon Volume 5 today and am looking at Honey So Sweet for my next manga series.

Ponyfan

[shelvesofwhimsy]

I'm currently reading Volume 1 of Cardcaptor Sakura Right before that it was Kill La Kill Volumes 2 and 3

I was also watching the Sakura anime, but took a break to branch out to learn about a few more shows before I go to Japan