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.
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".
Last edited by snispilbor (2008 September 26, 4:07 pm)
QuackingShoe
Member
From: USA
Registered: 2008-04-19
Posts: 721
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.
