Is it just me or do the japanese have super-vision?

[Dark Ariel7]

Lately I find myself wondering if the Japanese have some form of supervision or something. I mean have you ever tried reading a printed manga in japanese? The freaking kanji are tiny and the furigana hit the micro scale. Their freakin Light novels are published in the tinniest of books and still they seem to read them with no problem.

I also evolved that line of thinking into a stupider question that I never thought I would ask myself, "Am I 'looking' right?". When you need to ask yourself that you KNOW you are doing something wrong.

[Silvz]

All japanese have super powers .-.

 

I don't know about the kanjis situation, since I don't read japanese, but here in Brazil we have some really small-lettered books, and even mangas, so I guess that when you're used to the reading, it get's easier to understand it, even if so small, or blurred

[Yukiru]

Funny thing, when I started reading english books people asked if I could see the letters properly, It varies quite a bit it seems, but I find manga to have specially small characters, and misunderstanding things like 字 with  学 is already fairly complicated.

[Katatsumuri]

I... have never really ran into that particular problem, strangely... But I have never seen the text in manga to be tiny, which probably has something to do with my own handwriting being incredibly tiny, making me used to small text, no matter the language...

[Tenkuru]

I don't actually find them hard to read at all. Maybe it's because I'm chinese, so I'm used to reading small characters. But I do have people coming up and asking me whether I can even read the characters at all.

[Dark Ariel7]

I guess the fact that I am not used to the characters makes them appear more difficult to read when small. Making them appear smaller. But I swear that the furigana are diminutive. I can practically count the pixels(or dots I guess since it is a print not a screen character)

[garejei]

I read printed manga in Japanese and didn't have any problems with it... the furigana become easily recognizable even if they're small blots once you read enough Japanese and get used to it. Same goes for video games with low resolution where kanji blur together, a more seasoned reader will be able to recognize stuff based on the general shape and stuff.

[Zakamutt]

I looked some manga scans up before at high res and sometimes it is pretty damn hard. Presumably it's all due to lack of familiarity as said here though. I know I've tried to zoom into furigana and still remain mystified, though it was a while ago iirc.

[Nosebleed]

I've wondered this too. Sometimes I'm trying to read some raw manga panel and it's just impossible because I can't understand what character is there. Not even just kanji, sometimes I can't make out what kana is there.

I guess you just need to come in contact with it more to be able to get used to it.

[zoom909]

I think I had this problem at the beginning, like "is that a big tsu or a little tsu" or "is that ryaku or ryoku" etc.  But it went away by itself after a while.

 

By the way, you could go for the big phone-book-sized manga magazines.  Then the print will be bigger.  Although the definition is not quite as sharp because the paper is cheap.

I have several of those that would be good for practice.  Unlike the individual manga volumes, I don't plan to keep these because they're so cheaply printed.

[Bolverk]

*Scratches chin* At the start when I was practicing jap, I was really fussy about the font and size. I found it really hard to read if it weren't a nice clear font and big characters. Nowdays, it doesn't really matter much. I just recognise most of the kanji i know and kana's regardless of font and size for some reason. I suppose you start to recognise the kanji as you would recognise english words. Instead of seeing them as as mutiple c h a r a c t e r s, you see it as (characters) one cluster of letters. Which means you make some connection with the overall shape of the kanji, not it's radicals it's made up of. I am guessing this how you start instantly recognise them. Seems probable considering you can just by glancing on the characters you know what they mean.

 

Bottomline, read lots and small font is no problem. ^^

[Dark Ariel7]

I hate that in this world the answer to most problems always boils down to "Practice more." Not that is this case I was looking for one but, Why can't there be easy fixes?

[Tenkuru]

I hate that in this world the answer to most problems always boils down to "Practice more." Not that is this case I was looking for one but, Why can't there be easy fixes?

Easy fixes? Grab a magnifying glass. Voila!