EVENT IS FULL
Students with any Japanese background (including no Japanese language background at all), are welcome at this workshop on manga language. Japanese manga are well known for their expressive illustrations, but less apparent to language learners is how the Japanese language contributes to the vividness of character development via yakuwariko ‘role language’ (Kinsui 2003) and hatsuwa kyara ‘speech character types’ (Sadanobu 2006), and mimetic expressions. This workshop considers how readers interpret the language of manga, both in Japanese and in English translation, and use what they read to understand the nature of manga characters. Participants will be provided with manga examples to interpret, in English, to explore their impressions of characters from three manga, Horimiya, Love is Hard for Otaku, and Demon Slayer. Then, I will share research results  (Masuda & Yamamoto, under review), from our survey and interviews with intermediate Japanese language students and Japanese native speakers.

Kyoko Masuda is an Associate Professor of Japanese and Linguistics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, specializing in Cognitive Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, Japanese Discourse, and Sociocultural Theory. Her research is published in journals like 'Language and Sociocultural Theory', 'Modern Language Journal', and others. She is a co-author of the upcoming book Concept-based Language Instruction: Usage-based Linguistics and Sociocultural Theory in Teaching Japanese (Routledge).