How should I format my questions on JLU?

Question

Japanese Language and Usage has a few features and conventions to help everyone with understanding each other's questions and answers. If you find them useful, please feel free to use:

• Furigana Support: [漢字]​{ふりがな} -> [漢字]{ふりがな}
• We've somewhat adopted markdown syntax to our purposes, and have a few workarounds
• The standard Japanese Textbook markers for good/bad sentences: ○ and ×
• We prefer to work with kana/kanji-based questions and answers, but don't let that stop you from asking your question
• Questions can be in all Japanese if you want

Also note: There is no consensus on intonation-marking. Use what you like and we'll eventually settle on something.

Answer 1

Example Sentence Markup

There is a standard format used in Japanese textbooks for marking the acceptability of example sentences. Feel free to use these, or alternatively label unacceptable examples explicitly.

• ○ (U+25CB): correct (converts with まる in Windows IME)
• △ (U+25B3): sometimes correct (converts with さんかく in Windows IME)
• ？ (U+FF1F): questionable (full-width question mark)
• × (U+00D7): incorrect (converts with ばつ in Windows IME)

These usually appear directly before the first word of the sentence, and are generally only used for sentence examples isolated from any larger contextual text.

Discussion

Answer 2

Furigana/Ruby Markdown Support

JLU offers furigana/ruby support, implemented using the following format: [kanji]​{furi}gana

If a given word is not particularly common, please add furigana to it. As a rule of thumb, please add furigana if you yourself would need a dictionary to read a given word.

Also note: If you skip adding furigana to your question or answer, other users are likely edit your work to add the furigana. Please do not take offense, as they are just trying to make the site more usable to lower level users.

Some example uses:

Difference between 一緒​{いっしょ}に and 二人​{ふたり}で? -> Difference between 一緒{いっしょ}に and 二人{ふたり}で? Difference between 交ざる/混ざる​{まざる} and 交じる/混じる​{まじる}? -> Difference between 交ざる/混ざる{まざる} and 交じる/混じる{まじる}?

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At the bottom of nearly every screen on the site, there should be an 'options' button on the lower left that controls what the javascript-based furigana display system uses for syntax.

As you can see, the recommended reader-setting includes the 'full width brackets' that you can easily reach when typing in Japanese-mode on most IMEs. These are a commonly used alternative to the { and } ASCII brackets.

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For historical interest, originally we required a browser addon for furigana support. That discussion started in this thread, and continued here.

(As a quick aside, if you're asking about the furigana inserter in a question on meta, you can bypass it to show your examples by inserting ​ between the ] and the {.)

Answer 3

Romaji

Romaji is allowed, but we do prefer to work with kana/kanji

It isn't against any rules to write questions or answers using only romaji, but most of us do prefer kana and kanji.

Part of the reason for this is the wide variety of romanization systems, which can introduce ambiguity into the question or answer.

If you ask your question in all romaji, please do not take offense if other users edit your work to convert it to kana and kanji.

Here's an early discusion on meta.

Answer 4

Questions in Japanese

Questions can be in all-Japanese or all-English, or a mixture of both

If you have sufficient ability with Japanese to ask a question entirely in the language, feel free to do so. If you are able, an English translation would also be helpful to less advanced users of the site.

An all-Japanese question will probably be edited by other users to include an English translation, but the original should be left untouched unless there are errors in the Japanese (the same as any other question).

Answers will probably be given in both English and Japanese.

Discussion

Answer 5

We've somewhat adopted markdown syntax to our purposes

Quoting

We tend to use two different mechanisms for 'quoting' bits of Japanese in the middle of english text. The first is the backtick format for inline japanese. Note that the furigana inserter does work with this syntax, since it implemented as a client-side javascript formatter.

For larger sections of example text, we prefer to use the block-quote syntax over the pre-formatted text. One reason for this is that text, unlike code, usually can line-wrap freely, and the formatting is not nearly as important as the content. It's also somewhat easier to work with. This entire section was block quoted by using a single '>'.

Linking to Japanese URLs

If you insert URLs directly into markdown, you may run into issues with the japanese characters being ignored by the auto-URL parser.

The easiest solution is to use the link button on the edit screen, as that will convert the URL to a properly encoded form.

Discussion

Bold Text Embedded in Japanese Text

It can be convenient to bold certain parts of a sentence for focus. Unfortunately there is a markdown bug that can sometimes cause words not to be properly bolded unless they are surrounded by spaces. Since the Japanese language does not generally use spaces, this hits us harder than most sites. This bug has been particularly nasty in the past, as it has not shown up in the preview pane, but does show up in the final text.

A workaround is to use the "some<b>text</b>here" syntax which will produce -> "sometexthere"

Note that if you are trying to bold text using the furigana system, you currently must bold the ENTIRE block with syntax like this: <b>[漢字]​{かんじ}</b> in order to get [漢字]{かんじ}. Attempting to bold only part of the text in the furigana 'unit' will not work.