A friend scanned me some pages from an English translation of a manga. An appendix, which listed English translations for tons and tons of Japanese onomatopoeic words! Now if you ever wonder what it would sound like if Batman was punching people in Japanese, the answer is available!

Examples of Japanese Onomatopoeia

PS: Regarding copyright. I think this is okay because I'm not posting the scans themselves, just the translations, which aren't even in the same order (original order was by occurrence, I alphabetized it). And translations are generally not copyrightable, so I think I'm good.

I was just about to write a post asking if anyone had a list of such words. This should come in handy.
でも、なぜローマジ

nest0r Wrote:Edit once again: The sound I referred to above also refers to staring, and I remember watching Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei and that stalker girl also makes that sound or something similar when she stares, but vocally, which is pretty funny...

「じーっ」
Isn't she just adorable? ♡

Edit: http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=iRTMxRoFZsA みてみて

On another note, I just recalled that this episode is where I picked up the phrase "気になる".

[Katsuo]

ALC have a 擬音語／擬態語 dictionary with 352 entries.

It consists of general onomatopoeic words, i.e. not just geared towards manga.

It's aimed at Japanese people learning English but is easy to use in reverse.

I found it convenient to compile it into a single document for my own studies.

Katsuo Wrote:ALC have a 擬音語／擬態語 dictionary with 352 entries.

It consists of general onomatopoeic words, i.e. not just geared towards manga.

It's aimed at Japanese people learning English but is easy to use in reverse.

I found it convenient to compile it into a single document for my own studies.

Could you share?

Please

==
Uriel

Thanks for those links, everyone! I didn't realize this ground was already so well-covered!

hknamida Wrote:でも、なぜローマジ

Well, for one thing I'm not actually authoritative enough to do kana, when the scans I have are in romaji. For example, maybe (and this is just a hypothetical example) maybe some of these sounds are always written in hiragana, or always in katakana? I'd do you a disservice to just guess. Maybe some of them even have kanji?? Though I doubt it

Though, I have seen a "kanji sound effect" used as a joke. In yakatate japan, they give a horse some bread and the horse neighs something like "umeeeeeei" with kanji like 馬い in the background.

Here's something cool about these sound effects. Some of them can actually be used as regular words, usually as adverbs. For example, one of my sentences in mnemosyne is "彼らはひそひそと話をした", "they talked in whispers".

Man, they can pretty much ALL be used as regular words. It's one of the most absolutely hilarious things about the language, especially when big, tough-acting men use a きらきら in a sentence. Or when they're speaking romantically and say the same. I mean, I know it's just a base cultural difference, but I almost laugh every time.
It's like going "Their hearts THUD-THUDDed and the CRACK CRACK sent the building quaking. The last remaining survivors huddled together, clinging to each other desperately, as if they had some power to save each other. Finally, the raiders BOOMed the door down, and resounding PEW PEWs left a swath of bloody carnage in their wake."
I can't get over it.

Yeah onomatopoeic words like 'quack' are so childish.