How to Draw Manga -- Manga University Kana de Manga

Learning Japanese is easy with a little help from Kana de Manga!

Japanese comic books and cartoons have taken the world by storm. To remain on the cutting edge of the manga and anime trend, though, you've got to learn the lingo of the Land of the Rising Sun. Kana de Manga makes learning hiragana and katakana –– the "ABCs of Japanese" –– fun and easy for otaku of all ages.

Kana de Manga makes learning hiragana and katakana easy and fun for students who already enjoy Japanese comics.

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Each page has a humorous manga illustration representing a word that begins with the hiragana or katakana character featured prominently at the top. A brief explanation accompanies each drawing; the English equivalent of the word is given; and there is a work area where students can practice writing the characters.

Learning Japanese through manga also means that you don't learn just words, characters and grammar. Chihiro Hattori's manga illustrations and stories will teach you all about Japanese culture, which is almost as essential to learning about Japan as the writing system is!

There's no simpler way way to learn Japan's fundamental character sets, and with Kanji de Manga you're going to have so much fun learning them it'll be no time before you're reading comics written entirely in Japanese!

Kana de what?

Kimono Hiragana and katakana are the true "ABCs of Japanese." Learning just these two syllabaries, you can write any word, scentence, even a whole essay in Japanese. And if you can pronounce all of the sounds that make up the two syllabaries, there will be no word in Japanese that you won't be able to say.

So why are there two syllabaries? Don't they have identical sounds? Well, hiragana is used to write native Japanese words and inflections, whereas katakana is used to make foreign words readable to the Japanese. Each character represents a syllable, like "ki" or "ke," instead of just one letter, and so combinations of these sounds are what make up Japanese words.

Cake For example, the word kimono is written in hiragana because it is a native Japanese word, and it also has a kanji contraction with the characters meaning "to wear" and "thing." The word "keeki," on the other hand, is just a transliteration of the English "cake," and so this is written in katakana.

You may have heard that Japanese uses three sets of characters, and not just two –– and you'd be right. Kanji, which are more complex characters of Chinese origin, are used to contract multiple hiragana characters into one word and also to provide an easier at-a-glance reading for Japanese. Of course kanji are fun to learn and read as well; we've devoted an entire series to learning the called Kanji de Manga. But everyone has to learn the basics first, and Kana de Manga makes it easy and lots of fun!

What makes Kana de Manga so special?

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In addition to having fun and familiar manga illustrations to help you learn the characters on each page –– Kana de Manga has another innovative feature: you can learn hiragana and katakana at the same time.

While many Japanese textbooks will have you learning one set and then the other, this can be frustrating because you can't learn the differences between characters that represent the same sounds. With Kana de Manga though, you learn both sets side by side, one sound on each facing page. This way you don't end up learning hiragana well but katakana not so well, and the examples for each character will make sure you always use the right characters at the right time.

Kana de Manga features:

All for 46 hiragana and 46 katakana characters
92 original manga illustrations by Chihiro Hattori
Over 100 different vocabulary words and explanations
Plenty of practice pages, and handy tables of both character sets on the inside front and back covers