What are hiragana, kantakana, kanji, furigana, and romanji?
What is anime?
Anime is Japanese Animation. Though there is debate whether a non-japanese produced animation could be considered anime, I'll just keep this simply put. The one thing that most people agree to be anime is Animation from Japan, made in Japan, by Japanese people. Okay? Maybe you've heard of some titles. Examples of anime are : Sailor Moon, Speed Racer, Pokemon, Digimon, Slayers, Ranma 1/2, Mononoke Hime, Dragon Ball, Magic Knight Rayearth, Oh! My Goddess, Card Captor Sakura, Tenchi Muyo, My Neighbor Totoro, etc... The list is a long one. Anime also comes in many forms. Many are released on TV in Japan. There are also on-going video releases that can have unrelated stories involving the characters. And of course there are movies!
What is manga?
Manga are the book form of anime (or should I say that they are similar to comic books). In Chinese ('cause I know chinese and don't know japanese), the Japanese characters for manga stand for "slow drawing." The manga books are beautifully illustrated. Some are the inspiration for the anime series. Others were created after the anime series aired. They plot of the manga may be different from the anime.
What are OVA's or OAV's?
OVA stands for Original Version Animated (OAV's are the same thing, jsut different order of letters). These are usually stories that go straight to video release and can follow a different storyline from the anime or manga.
What are hiragana, kantakana, kanji, furigana, and romanji?
These are all ways to write Japanese. Hiragana consists of _(i forgot how many, i'll fill you in later, sorry! :)_ characters. With hiragana, you can be able to read and write most Japanese words. It's rather similar to an alphabet. Kantakana is a set of characters especially designed for foreign words. Their shapes are similar to hiragana, but are more sharp in their edges. Kanji is more complicated than the other two. It's a set of characters that represent words rather than sounds like the other two. Some of the kanji are similar to Chinese characters. Furigana is, well, I sorta know what it is and I sorta am confused so I'll get back to you on that one. (Luckily my friend is taking Japanese so I'll ask her later.) I think it's the small script of hiragana that is above the kanji. And romanji, is the romanized (or alphabetized) version of Japanese. But even that has two ways of writing it. 'In the Hepburn system, something such as "bicycle" is written as jitensha. In the kunrei-shiki system, it's written as zitensya(with a bar over n).' - the info in single quotes was found in a free college board sat ii booklet. ^^;;;