In this blog post, I explored the manga Hunter X Hunter, as recommended to me by my girlfriend. The plot of Hunter x Hunter takes place in a alternate reality where certain, super powered individuals roam the lands as freelance bounty catchers, these people are known as Hunters. The story revolves around 12 year old boy named Gon Freecss whom learns that his father, whom he had always been told was dead, is in fact alive and one of the most famed Hunters in the world. I found that this manga offered an array of different onomatopoeia on almost every page.
In this image, Gon catches a fish monster and his excitement can be captured with the use of onomatopoeia. In this case, it is used to show his excitement when he hooks the fish, and while he runs through town with it, too include the town reaction when they all gather around for a look.
Here is another example of onomatopoeia being used in the book, however I have to admit the different fonts make it harder for me to understand some of the more complex characters.
I really enjoyed looking through this manga, and am considering reading through all of it. That depends if my busy schedule permits though. But all in all, this style of writing and art really fascinated me, since the onomatopoeia really popped out of the screen, and even though it was a challenge to correlate the katakana with the actual noise it made in real life, it was still a pleasure to read.
My basic understanding of Nihongo onomatopoeia, is that there are three families; Giseigo: which are words that mimic voices of people and animals, Giongo: Words that imitate sounds, and Gitaigo: words that represent something visual or a feeling. Its a common question why even though both katakana and hiragana are used for onomatopoeia katakana is used more often. And while there is no rule necessarily, some have said hiragana has more of a "soft" sounding compared to that of katakana.
Below is a link that I found useful when trying to translate the katakana onomatopoeia to it's intended sound/action of the manga.
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