“服従するよりほかしかたがなかった”
This is a sentence taken from “The Promised Neverland“. The word at the head of the sentence is read ふくじゅう and means obedience or submission. A literal translation would give “There wasn’t any other way than to obey” although a more natural translation might be “I had to obey“, although the Japanese way makes it sound more resigned. as well as less direct.
What is interesting here is how “仕方” is how the author chose to write it in hiragana instead of kanji. Since Japanese sentences don’t use spaces between words, this makes it doubly difficult to read at a glance, even for a Japanese speaker (I did the test). This is where using the kanji would have been very helpful. This issue crops up quite often when reading manga aimed at younger audiences.
For example, at first glance Doraemon might seem a breeze but it’s a real headache, since it’s 90% kana, making it difficult to distinguish words from grammar. Kids don’t have trouble with it because they are familiar with the sounds of the words. On the other hand, manga targeting adults tend to overuse kanji, using them even for words that are typically written in kana (more on that in another post).
The trick is to be able to recognise common grammatical patterns such as “なかった“(wasn’t) so one can quickly find the “odd word” out, hidden in the middle of all that hiragana. So when using manga as a study tool, handle these long blocks as road bumps and proceed a little more slowly – you might find something interesting.
Hiking Around Tokyo 