Quote:
Originally Posted by dustfire
Not sure if this is the right section, if so it can be moved.
Anyway I was in a store skimmed through some books/novels in Japanese out of curiosity. My knowledge in the language is pretty much rudimentary, so perhaps that is it. Aside from the obvious top to bottom and right to left reading. I was confused about something else.
In languages I have encountered before, novels usually have something like
"I am so angry" said character X
However as I skim through one book I did not notice anything like that. There were some [] here and there. It may have been the novel I picked up but do Japanese novels in general avoid identifying who ever is talking or was it the book I glimpse at just unique in that way?
If not how does one follow the story?
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In Japanese novels, the narrator often doesn't identify the speakers of the direct quotations. However, this only occurs when it is clear to the reader as to what character is speaking the line.
Not that I've paid much attention to this fact before, mostly because I am a Japanese-speaker to begin with, I can think of a couple of factors concerning the Japanese language that make these unidentified direct quotations possible.
1. Men and women speak totally different from each other.
2. Within either gender, people speak very differently according to their ages and varried social backgrounds.
3. Most importantly, each speaker has his/her own favorite sentence-ending particles, first-person pronoun, etc.
4. Characters speak in dialects. It isn't just "accents" as in some other languages. They actually use different words.
These factors pretty much tell the reader who is saying a particular line.
Thanks for the good question!
We are writing a story in the following thread and though we haven't done many pages yet, you can see this very phenomenon already. Unidentified quotations!
みんなで何か物語を作りませんか？