What Languages are Spoken in Cuba?
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JapaneseJapanese as it appears in anime and Japanese as it appears in real life are quite different. It might technically be the same language, but polite Japanese is essentially a separate dialect.
Generally, loan words like "animation" are spelled with katakana (anime アニメ). Simple words are spelled with hiragana. Most nouns are spelled with kanji.
The Japanese alphabet is really three writing systems that work together. These three systems are called hiragana, katakana and kanji. If that sounds overwhelming, don't worry!
Japanese is ranked by the U.S. Foreign Services Institute as the most difficult language for native English speakers to learn.
Anime has a visual language that shorthands character emotions and states of mind. The visual language comes from manga and its efforts to clarify the inner world of characters without resorting to words. Visual language can be thought of as a vocabulary of adverbs and adjectives. They add more detail to a character’s behavior.
Some anime use dialects to match the art style of the series. Visual words can be combined to show conflicting states of mind or emphasize one state. Many manga artists create their own visual words, which may become a part of the anime lexicon. Much of anime’s visual language focuses on the eyes (the style of the eyes can be considered a noun).
Some anime use chibi as their main art style. Chibi can stand in for a character’s childhood, depending on the style of the series.
Anime uses large eyes because they allow for better emotional expression than small eyes. The face of characters acts as a canvas in addition to a likeness. This view gives animators freedom to change the likeness of a character in order to express the character’s thoughts and emotions in a situation.
Wavy lines show irritation or upset emotions. Colors such as bright red are used for anger. Darker colors like purples or blues are used to show the characters are feeling sick, upset, or depressed. Patterns vary but here are two of the most common.
Anime dialogue, meanwhile, is predominantly the sort of dialogue you'd hear among kids at recess. While some shows do, of course, take place in an adult setting and/or have measured, polite, realistic characters, most of anime's iconic characters and lines come from teenagers and/or warriors of some kind.
And formal Japanese is very different than looser language. Verbs are conjugated differently, extra words and fragments of words are added just for decorum, and the language takes on an indirectness ...
Much like their American counterparts, Japanese voice talent generally over-enunciate every word, and put a lot more tone of voice into every sentence. If you picked up most of your Japanese from anime and try to speak it in the same way, you're going to sound like a radio announcer rather than a normal person.