Japan Junior Tournament promos card names

[NightBeing]

What's with some of these cards having somethng written above the card name in an extra-small font? Is it just something about Japanese language (because on the Library page with these cards they have these "superscript" symbols follow the bolded ones which form the name) or what?

[yawg07]

What's with some of these cards having somethng written above the card name in an extra-small font? Is it just something about Japanese language (because on the Library page with these cards they have these "superscript" symbols follow the bolded ones which form the name) or what?

Those smaller japanese characters are known as "Furigana" and are used to simplify the more complex characters known as "Kanji".
So yes, it is something about the language, not an extra name or anything.

[NightBeing]

Are they used only in some cases? Because other text on cards doesn't have them, nor other cards' names have...

[Volcanon]

They starting having it after Mirrodin or something because some younger people couldnt read some of the card names.

[yawg07]

They starting having it after Mirrodin or something because some younger people couldnt read some of the card names.

Yeah the first time I noticed it was in kamigawa, it is actually pretty useful for people learning japanese as well.

[Volcanon]

Yesh. Id presume it's even harder for the mandarin speakers, as a lot of the names on legends and whatnot are transliterated into characters. Though when there's no nifty alphabet i guess people learn the characters faster.

[oracle_of_truth]

Btw, the reason why the Ruby text (thats the technical term for Furigana or similar superscripts) is displayed after the name is because most browsers do not support it. In theory the characters should appear as on the card (as much as I dislike IE, the beta shows ruby text correctly).

As for mandarin speakers, it is not hard when you grew up with the Chinese characters. The Japanese on the other hand learn Furigana and Katakana first at school.