#tategaki

[baseballbybsmile]

“Seasons Greetings From Japan - Lou Gehrig” ~ Rare 1930’s Christmas card from the New York Yankees legend. The Tategaki inspired inscription is a nice touch!

[qaantar-japanese]

OK, the last bit on vertical writing (tategaki). The first picture comes from the Wikipedia page on genkou youshi ( 原稿用紙, manuscript paper), which involves vertical writing.

The diagram shows the common way that a page will be laid out. The first column (1) has the title starting on the fourth square. The author is in the second column (2) written in such a way that one square is left empty at the bottom. The third column starts the first sentence (3), starting on the second square. Any subsequent paragraphs will also start on the second square. Any new sub-sections will leave a blank column, show the title starting on the third square, and leave another blank column (4). And finally, normally punctuation gets its own square, but if punctuation would be in the first square at the top, instead it is put in with the final character at the bottom of the column (5). Note that the sokuon (little っ) is not punctuation but its own character, so it can start at the top of a column.

I also included the first page of the first Vampire Hunter D novel. Here you can see these rules in action (other than the author’s name), including the new paragraphs and the punctuation rule.

[qaantar-japanese]

Continuing with challenges that students face when learning to write Japanese vertically, Nagiko-sensei says that sometimes students write furigana on everything (those are the little kana next to the kanji that show the pronunciation).

Here again, the student says that the teacher does it, but again, the teacher replies that she doesn’t need the furigana to be able to read it. Typically, Japanese people will only write out the furigana for very rare or uncommon words (certainly not for 今日).

[qaantar-japanese]

Continuing with common mistakes that students make while learning to write Japanese vertically, Nagiko-sensei notes that students enter in spaces (スペース) unnecessarily. 

The student says that sensei also does it to make reading sentences easier, but she replies that can read it just fine without the spaces (and normally, one would write without such spacing).

[qaantar-japanese]

Continuing the topic of common mistakes with vertical Japanese writing, Nagiko-sensei says that students sometimes put punctuation (句読点, kutouten) in the exact middle of the box (such as the 。 and 　、 in the comic panel).

Punctuation should go in the upper right quadrant of the square -- that is, it’s closer to the kana that comes before it, just like if you were writing horizontally.

In this case, the student notes that in Taiwan they write punctuation in the middle (I assume when writing Chinese). But such is not the case for Japanese.

[qaantar-japanese]

Chapter 5 of Shiranai is about Japanese writing. The next five or so snippets will be about 縦書き (tategaki, vertical writing). Nagiko-sensei points out common errors that her students make when learning to write Japanese vertically. In this example, the student has taken イーメール (i-me-ru) and attempted to write it vertically, but incorrectly.

First, when writing Japanese using katakana (the script usually used for foreign words or for emphasis), a dash is used to show longer vowels ( イーメール has two of them) -- they look like 一 (ichi, one), but they are long vowel marks.

When writing vertically, these long vowel marks go from horizontal ( ー) to vertical (|), like Nagiko-sensei says in her thought bubble in the left of the manga panel. Note that the kanji for one (一) would stay horizontal!