People almost always ask what manga has to do with anime. Manga are like the skeletons of most anime. Almost every anime starts out as a manga (altho sometimes they go backwards from anime to manga). So what are manga? They're like anime in book form. Manga, like anime are extremely diverse in the subjects they cover. On one end of the spectrum are the cutesey manga, like "Tenchi Muyô!", and on the opposite end is the dark and gory "Blade of the Immortal." As far as appearances, with the exception of "Ghost in the Shell" I've yet to see a color manga. Most translated manga are "mirrored" versions of the original Japanese, the cells being put opposite of their original form (i.e. they flip 'em). Others have been put together using the manual "cut and paste" method of cutting cells and rearranging their order to read left to right instead of right to left. And in manga, sound effects reign supreme. In any almost any scene imaginable there's a sound effect or emotion to go with it (even when you open a door you get a "krrk" sound). For example, when Usagi realizes that Mamoru is Tuxedo Kamen, the background of the cell has "SHOCK!" pasted across it. In Neon Genesis Evangelion, when Unit 01 falls flat on its face, "Crash" is pasted next to it. All these different factors fuel together to create something as intriguing if not more enchanting than the anime.

Oftentimes portions of manga are left in Japanese (usually the sound fx). The Japanese language itself has 2 writing systems, hiragana and katakana. Hiragana is used for prefixes and suffixes to Chinese characters (kanji) and for purely Japanese words (e.g. "honshitsu"), whereas katakana is used solely for words of foreign origin, e.g. "naifu" (knife), or "noiroze" (neurotic). [click here for other info on Japanese and Japanese phrases].

Although hiragana or katakana can be used to represent all the sounds of the Japanese language, most nouns, verbs and adjectives are written in kanji (which is why it helps to know Chinese before you learn Japanese). Hiragana is used for particles and polite expressions as well as to show inflections of verbs and adjectives. Japanese written in Roman letters is called Romaji.