Now, time for manga

Manga time =)

I thought that I should split into two posts as it would seem strange for me to talk about manga after talking about CURE magazine. Though it wasn’t in too much detail anyway.

Strangely enough, the English manga came out before the Chinese one

The English manga for Vampire Knight was out about a month ago but the Chinese one only came out this week. I hope it ends soon as this manga was supposed to be under my no-longer-reading list. As I mentioned before, the only reason why I picked this up again was because… (I don’t think that anyone who have read or watched Vampire Knight might treat this as a spoiler) Yuki is / was a vampire and she is going to be reinstated with her title. =D

I have nothing to say except that I was right to convert to Taiwan manga

The reasons below would explain why.

Firstly, the print sucks. Last year they increased the price of the manga from $5 to $5.50 and they still give us such lousy quality? Even online scans do a better job at cleaning. (I did not take any pictures but within the manga, at least 10-20% of the pages have lousy quality)

Secondly, their chinese pwnz. From one way of spelling, they can change to all kinds of different spelling as long as it sounds the same. For example, there were instances of 夜一 turning into 夜以 and thats only the part on the character’s names. Some of the words actually changed into Traditional Chinese. Seriously, if I had not been reading Taiwan manga, I might have been stumbled by the sudden change in character. Their QC must have been skiving off. If someone as average as me could spot so many mistakes, I think I would do a better job as a QC.

Perhaps even for the Bleach manga, which I am only reading for kicks, I would be better off buying the Taiwan version as Singapore’s standard is considerably dropping or perhaps I was not observant enough to begin with. I can go on for another few thousand words on Chuang Yi but due to the lack of time I shall carry on.

I just hope that if any person from Chuang Yi sees this post, please please please please please please please please check through the manga over and over, for quality and translation and whether the words are different etc. Chuang Yi has mentioned about learning Chinese through reading (Chinese) manga but if they themselves are unable to produce manga with proper chinese how will they help the students?

Taiwan manga ^__^

I prefer Taiwan manga for the following reasons.

Firstly, they have much higher quality in their work. I would rarely see a page in which the character looks faded, unless its something like To Love Ru.

Secondly, their chinese is somewhat perfect. I don’t see interchanging characters or wrong spelling words. Their use only Traditional Chinese but I would not recommend Taiwan manga to people who are not very good or at least do average in Chinese. Though, I have a classmate who always fails his Chinese tests but still buys Taiwan manga because I introduced them to him. However, it takes him about 2 hours to read Nightmare of Nunnally (Code Geass spinoff) whereas it took me around 1 hour (Which is actually quite slow anyway) but at least he made it. =D

Thirdly, Taiwan has a whole wide range of manga unlike Singapore which probably publishes less than 1 / 100 of Taiwan’s manga. I do not blame Chuang Yi for the lack of variety and furthermore, if they cannot translate Bleach properly, how would they translate other stuff like Team Medical Dragon or other manga which has specific terminology?

Fourth, er… I do not know whether this counts but Taiwan manga uses better quality paper. =) Especially Kadokawa. I have heard from Rdrake the reasons behind why Kadokawa has better quality paper but seriously, the rate in which Singapore manga degrades is beyond anything. Most of my manga (Singapore) would turn yellow very quickly even if I keep them in a dry cupboard but those from taiwan are still in rather good condition.

Sigh, this would be the third time I am reading this

Currently, I am reading Negima in this order. English online scans -> Japanese manga -> Taiwan (Chinese) manga.

Oh yeah. I took an online career quiz, which was said to be rather accurate if you did it carefully, yesterday. Instead of getting something like a teacher (Yeah, thats my ambition T___T) I got things like Librarian, Political Scientist, Curator, Playwright, Reporter, Journalist, Research Officers etc. Most of them in the line of writing.

Maybe, just maybe, the reason why I like to pick the bad points of others and write long rants is because of my character? Given a choice, I would pick teaching as a career but if I have to choose from the list above, I would pick being reporter. As a matter of fact, my father used to be the chief reporter for the local Chinese newspaper so maybe I got my Chinese genes from him. Oh well, its always convenient to push all the blame to your genes. =)

I have not started reading nor watching Evagelion but I keep buying the manga

Oh well, since it is Kadokawa published manga it will probably last for a long long time before ever turning yellow so I can take my time to read it. Thats all for this year I think. For those who do not know, Chinese New Year is the day after tomorrow, which is on Monday. So effectively I am still in the previous year and I will probably not put any posts over the next few days so Happy New Year to the people who sees this. =)