Japanese question

[owlmoose]

So I started Fruits Basket (just a few pages in, but it's definitely promising). I know people have explained this to me before, but I'm already getting lost with all the forms of address in Japanese. My understanding is that -san denotes respect and -chan denotes affection (and I realize I'm probably missing all sorts of nuances there), but what does -kun mean? Are there others I need to remember?

Comments

[regann]

You might run into -sempai, too. It's what someone uses (in the case of a high school manga like you're reading) for a lowerclassmen to refer to a upperclassmen. (Like a freshman would call a senior, Smith-sempai.

And, yeah, they called Braska, Braska-sama, in FFX. Interesting they called the Maesters like Seymour are called -sama plus another title (roshi, i think?) to show how respected they are.

In Yuugiou, aka Yugioh, Yuugi calls just about all his male friends their last name + kun. Jounouchi-kun, Kaiba-kun, etc., so yeah, I think of it as a friendly male teen-to-teen greeting. (Kaiba, of course, calls no one by -kun and all his employees as well as brother use -sama for him...)

[owlmoose.livejournal.com]

Yeah, sempai came up, although it was used on its own, not as suffix. More like a title. But this manga is very newbie-friendly and it defined the term in a footnote.

Thanks! :)