Pow! Thump! Thwack! Onomatopoeias attempt to write sound effects on page so we can hear them through our eyes. They include calls of animals, sounds of nature, sounds of people, and other sounds (Alilyeh & Zeinolabedin, 2014). The Batman TV series from the 1960s played around with visual sound effects during fight scenes. This allowed the series feel like a moving comic book.

Manga has its own set of sound effects. As a manga reader, you may notice how publishers translate few of these sound effects. One reason: it would require someone to edit the artwork. This costs money. A second reason: Japanese has sound effects English doesn’t have. The Japanese language has around 1,200 onomatopoeia classified into three families (Kadooka, 2009; Inose, n.d.). English sports about a third of this number. Many sound effects remain untranslatable.

Combining Japanese onomatopoeia with English words gives manga readers an advantage over prose readers. Scholars call manga a multimodal text. This means manga requires readers to use a broad set of skills. Manga readers have to know how to read text combined with images. They have to know Japanese sound effect words and English transliterations like maiko and shonen. Of course, good manga reads right to left, which requires the brain to work differently. This means manga readers develop stronger multidimensional thinking abilities than traditional readers.

Most manga use katakana to write onomatopoeia, but sometimes you’ll see hiragana and kanji too. Katakana specializes in loanwords from other languages. For example: television, テレビ (terebi). In English grammar, transliterations and uncommon loanwords appear in italics—you won’t see taco in italics, well except for here. Katakana serves a similar purpose as italics.

The Three Families

Onomatopoeias fall into three families. Each family represents a type of sound they attempt to mimic. English sound words share the same families (Inose, n.d.). The first two families represent stereotypical sound words. The last family, however, involves more than sound.

The Call of the Wild

The first family, giseigo, includes words that mimic the voices of people and animals.