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"hahaha" is actually the laughter sound in manga, but usually it's written in katakana, as are most sound words (the ones that are suppose to be like boom! or smash!). I was just flipping through a manga, and there is a time the main chatacter says "ha" with a little tsu after it, which is suppose to make the "ha" a short sound, but the ha is written in hiragana, and I think it's implying a kind of sigh or "oomph" sound. But I'm still ghoing to guess the "hahaha" you're refering to is laughter.

The mom think can be confusing. haha (母) is what to use when refering to your own mother and okaasan (お母さん) is what you'd call someone elses mother. However I've noticed in manga and anime, people calling their own mothers "okaachan," it's kind of like "mommy" i think. Also in essays, sometimes I'll see the auther refering to someone elses mother as "haha-oya" (母親) haha is the mother kanji and oya is the kunyomi of the parent kanji.

anyone else have japanese use in manga questions, i think this is a good thread to post it.

=| I don't get you. Hiragana and katakana are hardly labeled 'first and second' alphabets respectively. And if they are, it would be because hiragana is used much more widely, and a native/fluent speaker can probably comprehend sentences in pure hiragana, even without the help of kanji and katakana to differentiate.

xD Similarly, a Japanese/Chinese person could ask why the 'maru' in America is a dot.

Interesting. I wouldn't recommend trying to study Japanese from manga itself. There is too much slang, dialects, rude/impolite/incomplete/shortened verb forms and endings, etc.

However once you do reach a certain level in your studies (I'd say around a year and a half), you'll be able to read through it without having to look up individual words. You'll be able to understand it as a whole, and then you can go back and nitpick.

Understanding the short, and often curt-sounding slang or informal talk of Japanese comes from experiencing it outside of class. If you live in Japan, you will hear it all around you and see it nearly everyday on TV. You may not get most of it, and it may sound a lot cooler than the polite stuff you learn first, but really, polite as a base is much stronger when you finally start to ease into casual Japanese... which abounds in manga.

Also with the usage of katakana and hiragana, and why kanji isn't used sometimes, why katakana is inserted into a non-foreign word.. I think that when katakana is used in a Japanese word, particularly in an ending like "n" or "zo", it's kinda like italics in English, an emphasis.

As for when hiragana is used instead of a kanji for that word, there are actually a lot of words that are preferrably written in hiragana by the general public, and may only appear in kanji form in more polite or official writings, or novels. You'd be surprised on how many forms of speech are used just for writing in novels, and is not heard in everyday talk.

Also remember that manga aims at various age groups, so sometimes kanji is omitted for the sake of the reader's assumed level, or furigana is printed over it.

Steer clear of historical manga because there are tons of obscure and hard-to-find kanji with different readings than today's! Some aren't even in the electronic dictionairies and you'd need a kanji dictionary to find them.

PS on that subject I am still looking for the official definition of "oiran".
花魁 I think it means "head prostitute" from the context of the story (um, lol I'm reading about prostitutes in the Yoshiwara district, 1700s sweatdrop ), but I'm not sure, and don't have a kanji dictionary to check. But it does use something with flowers like the geisha, i.e. the "flower money" and such..

Wisteria: If I'm not wrong, the oiran (or tayuu) were the top-ranked courtesans, and the one unique feature about them besides exorbitant fees, etc. was that they were the ones summoned directly by the shogunate and top officials and brought to their homes, instead of waiting around for customers. (Though they did take other customers that they approved of.)

konnnichiwa