Japanese Japanese translations

[SunLight]

konnichiwa

 

Well, I was wondering, maybe someone is interested in learning Japanese?

 

I am a beginner, and this thread won't make sense unless some other nub like me joins, and someone who is good or native is willing to correct our mistakes (onegai! )

 

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anyway, I thought it would be interesting to do something like this:

 

- we post a - short, and possibly not too much advanced - text (from a song, anime dialogue, anything you want) and we try to translate it.

Not just translate, though, we should try to explain what is what, and why the translation is such and such, like a sort of text analysis. That's why I said short text, otherwise it would get too long. If someone who knows better finds mistakes, they can point them out.

 

I'm afraid we need to use romaji (i.e. Latin characters). I know it's terrible, and it's not real Japanese but I noticed a sort of bug, sometimes I posted words in Japanese just for fun and after a while, coming back to that page, it was all messy and unreadable (unicode or similar encoding problems in the forums?)

And also not everyone knows a lot or kanji, some beginners might not be able to read even hiragana or katakana scripts. Maybe we can add 2 lines, jp + reading below.

 

Anyway, that's my idea, hopefully someone is interested...

 

suggestions are welcome, and also if some total beginner needs advice on how to start learning I can help (who cannot do teaches, as they say ^^)

 

以上 [いじょう - ijou]... that's all for now

[yellow flash]

I'll start this with short sentence from my fav anime "eru, shiteiru ka? shinigami wa ringo shika tabenai"

[~Sumiko]

Nihongo wakarimasen

[RedBaird]

I'll start this with short sentence from my fav anime "eru, shiteiru ka? shinigami wa ringo shika tabenai"

Testing Sunlight's Unicode problem here with a copy & paste:

 

What is the alliteration of this phrase in japanese? 

死の神がりんごだけを食べることをL、知っているか。 

I know it means this : L did you know that the death god only eats apples?

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100408140558AAlyjv2

 

[Heretic121]

 

Testing Sunlight's Unicode problem here with a copy & paste:

What is the alliteration of this phrase in japanese?

 

死の神がりんごだけを食べることをL、知っているか。

 

I know it means this : L did you know that the death god only eats apples?

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100408140558AAlyjv2

Testing quotes, also Death Note? xD

[SunLight]

I'll start this with short sentence from my fav anime "eru, shiteiru ka? shinigami wa ringo shika tabenai"

 

ok, here is how it's written in the japanese srt I found: 「 L 知っているか、死神はリンゴしか食べない」

Eru shitteiru ka, shinigami wa ringo shika tabenai

 

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detailed translation (i'm noob and I know only a bit of Japanese, so beware of mistakes):

L (eru) - should stand for 'L' but since in Japanese they use only a certain set of syllables, when you write it in Katakana (script used for foreign words, among other things) it's エ(E) ル(RU) (there is no isolated l, so you have to pick ru, and r-l sounds are written with the same symbol)

 

知っている (shitteiru) - from shitte+iru, shitte is the 'te-form of shiru 知る (to know), in the past is shitta, then a->e it's shitte, te-form + iru should give the same meaning as English -ing form, i.e. being in the state of 'knowing'

 

か (ka) - should mean it's a question, but afaik it's used only in formal Japanese, while here is informal... no idea why (told u I was a noob)

 

死神 (shinigami) - God of Death

 

は (read as wa when it's a particle, normally you read that character as 'ha') - it means: what comes before is the topic you're talking about, in this case you talk about shinigami, so shinigami wa means something like 'as regards shinigami, or as for shinigami, etc.)

 

リンゴ (ringo) - (don't know why it's written in katakana here) apple/apples - in Japanese nouns have no singular or plural

 

しか (shika) - with a negative verb it should mean 'nothing but'

 

食べない (tabenai) - informal negative of the verb 食べる (taberu: to eat)

 

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so a literal (and a bit free) translation would be:

Eru shitteiru ka, shinigami wa ringo shika tabenai

L knowing ? ,  Shinigami [as for] apple other-than not-eat

 

that is, in normal English: L, do you know Shinigami eat only apples?

 

 

Nihongo wakarimasen

 

you should say: nihongo ga wakarimasen

'ga' means you specify something about the thing that comes before the 'ga', so about nihongo (japanese language) you say 'wakarimasen' (don't understand)

 

wakarimasen is formal, if you talk with a friend you would say wakaranai, but you'd better stick with formal

(there are other variations, for example in Osaka they say wakarahen as far as I know, but it's dialect, or wakaran, etc. etc. in anime you find these things sometimes)

 

 

Testing Sunlight's Unicode problem here with a copy & paste:

 

What is the alliteration of this phrase in japanese? 

死の神がりんごだけを食べることをL、知っているか。 

I know it means this : L did you know that the death god only eats apples?

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100408140558AAlyjv2

 

 

死の神

Edited October 2, 2014 by SunLight

[RedBaird]

I just realized that Sunlight must have tired of learning Computer Programming Languages and is now learning Human Languages!

[DeathBringer*]

sunlight your ideas are very weird hahaah

[SunLight]

I just realized that Sunlight must have tired of learning Computer Programming Languages and is now learning Human Languages!

true... at least it takes more time for human languages to become obsolete

 

by the way, in that sample sentence you can see all 4 kinds of characters they use in Japanese:

「 L 知っているか、死神はリンゴしか食べない」

 

'our' characters [L]

Chinese characters (kanji) (usually more complex visually) [知死神食]

Japanese Hiragana (more 'rounded') [っているかはしかべない]

Japanese Katakana [リンゴ]

 

It's fairly easy to read hiragana and katakana, for example い is 'i' ('ee' sound, for English speakers) か is 'ka', etc.

 

Kanji are hard to read, not only because there is thousands of them, but the reading is not always the same.

 

For example if you take those characters 死 (death) 神(god), in shinigami (死神) you read them 'shini' 'gami', but if you wrote 死の神 you would read 'shi' 'no' (hiragana character) 'kami', or for example water (水) when alone is read 'mizu' but you can read it 'sui' in some words, some characters have many readings

 

Personally I don't learn the readings, I think there are too many exceptions, I just learn a word and the characters you need, e.g. 'shinigami' = death+god

[SunLight]

Since this section is new, I'll add some extra lines.

But these translations take 2 much time, and I don't have much... especially to translate things I understand already but I hope at least some total beginner will get an idea about how Japanese works.

 

next time I will only post things I can't understand myself

 

Ichigo meets Rukia, Bleach episode 1

 

rows (in order): Japanese, reading, literal translation, english subs, notes

 

(Ichigo:) わかんねえ...
wakannee...
[(I) don't know 1]
I don't get it...
1 wakannee is sort of slang, it should be 'wakaranai'. 'I' is implied here. Wakaranai could also mean you don't know, we don't know, etc. but obviously Ichigo talks about himself.

 

アイツ は いったい...
aitsu wa ittai...
[that guy 1] [what the heck 2]
Who was she...?
1 aitsu is a bit derogative

2 here ittai (一体) is written in hiragana (いったい). you don't need to use Chinese characters all the time, but if you look something up in a dictionary you find it written with kanji

 

なんだ? テメエ...
nan-da? temee...
[What?] [you 1,2]
Who are you?
1 temee means you, but it's sort of offensive and not used in normal situations. In fact sometimes it's translated as 'you bastard' or similar things.

2 written in Katakana even if it's Japanese. It happens often in anime subtitles, manga, etc. probably to emphasize a word

 

テメエ は 誰 だ! なんの 用 だ!?
temee wa dare da! nan-no you da!?
[you] [who] [to be 1]! [what kind of] [business] [to be 1]
Who are you? What do you want?
1 it's *not* a verb, but it has the same function here of the verb 'to be' in European languages, i.e. telling that something is what it is

 

enough for now... too much writing

[meow]

I am learning japanese.

 

I know the real basic for making sentences/grammar.

 

And I know my hiragana and katakana.

 

But I'm mostly learning my kanjis and vocabs lately. I am using WaniKani (website) to learn them.

 

Pretty fun as it's almost like a remembering game.

 

You start level 1 and learn easy radicals/kanjis/vocabs. And the more you fail one of those, the more you'll have to review it. The more you get it right, the less you'll review it.

It really helps to remember them. Once you got right the level's radicals and kanjis enough times, you level up. Then you get new lessons. (you'll still review the level 1 stuff, but less often)

 

I am level 7 right now. If you never fail and do your review every time they pop up, I think it's 8 days per level...I think my average is 10-11 days

 

The first 3 levels are free, so I suggest you all give it a try. Then it's like 80$ for a year. But there's a code to get it for 50$.

 

Obviously you need to know Hiragana, because you'll need it for the readings of the kanjis and vocabs.

[SunLight]

At the moment I use only things written by myself, since that PC where I used to study was prehistoric (the one I use now is 'less' prehistoric, but still is ), and Anki (free srs software) was too slow there.

 

Before that I used Anki, I also wrote a couple of plugins for Anki, but when they changed version to 2.x I got tired of updating them, so now everything I use is written by myself (kanji review, text reading with dictionary+word readings for unknown words only, colored words)

[huge amount of spaghetti-code with hardcoded paths for my pc and similar horrible stuff, which I change every other day, and I never tested it on Windows, plus obviously I didn't care about open source licenses and copy-pasting stuff like rikai or edict, since I was writing for personal use only, a.k.a. 'don't ask for the code, it's nothing special and it won't work in your pc']

 

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I can write around 600-700 kanji (with correct stroke order, but with awful handwriting ^^) and I recognize another 600, with the usual srs-like method (increasing review intervals), and I give names to parts like in Heisig's 'Remembering the kanji' book, but I changed many of them (good book overall, but Heisig made some questionable choices when it comes to primitives, etc), and also, unlike Heisig I use Japanese keywords if I already know the word, for example I don't review 見 as 'see' (it makes no sense to me) but as 'miru'

 

Then I have a list of words with 'levels' (no srs, but similar idea... level 0 is for words I looked up in the dictionary, level 1 'familiar' words but not known, level2 short term memory, etc.). In theory I should review level 0 every day, and the higher the level, the longer the interval.

 

I also try to remember 'pitch accents' if I can, but I'm so noob...

for example もう (mou) can be read as ˙モー. or  モ˙ー· (high low, or low-high pitch) but I don't know which meaning of 'mou' is read with the first pitch pattern, and which is read with the second. I focus on understanding right now so I don't care about speaking.

 

Recently I'm too lazy to learn new vocabulary every day, therefore I'm stuck at the 2000 words level, a.k.a. the 'I don't understand anything' level

 

Imho the hardest thing is grammar, when they use all those little words that have no equivalent in English or other European languages, different word order, etc.

 

For the grammar I use the free (and very good imho) grammar book by Tae Kim. The only downside is, there is no furigana so you need to read kanjis straight away in the examples, but grammar words are usually written in hiragana so it's not that important.

 

sorry for the long post with way-too-long sentences

[meow]

Imho the hardest thing is grammar, when they use all those little words that have no equivalent in English or other European languages, different word order, etc.

 

 

Particles, damn particles.

[SunLight]

Since recently I'm a bit of a babymetal fan ^^ I'll translate a couple of sentences from Moa Kikuchi's diary, where she talks about the accident in London, when she slipped on something someone threw on stage yurusenaiii! (unforgivable ^^)
 
It was hard to read her own handwriting sometimes, and ofc I couldn't cut+paste from an image so I had to type it, but what I read is this (hopefully no mistakes, Japanese has no spaces, I put spaces here for an easier reading): 

---

(Japanese, reading, literal transl)
その 気持ち に たくさん こたえたくて、いっぱい 返したくて、
sono   kimochi          ni        takusan kotaetakute,             ippai           kaeshitakute,
[this] [feeling/mood 1] [towards] [a lot] [want-to-answer, and 2], [to the utmost] [want-to-return (and) 3]

 
MOAMETAL の 全て を 見てもらいたい と 思いました。
Moametal      no   subete           o                       mitemoraitai     to                omoimashita.
[Moametal 4] ['s] [the whole, all] [direct object particle] [want-to-show 5]

[thought (formal)]

 
The whole sentence roughly means: I thought I really wanted to return that (audience's) feeling and show them my best as an answer
 
Notes:
1 she talks about the audience's mood
2 答える (こたえる in hiragana) kotaeru -> answer, reply -> kotaetai (volitive) means want to answer. kotaetakute (te-form of adjectives) is used to join more things in a list with a meaning simlar to 'and'
3 same as above, 返す [かえす] kaesu->kaeshitai->kaeshitakute
4 To say 'I' she uses her own name, which is sort of female-childish-kawaii speech ^^
5 mite+moraitai, from 見る miru (see) te-form + morau, gives the meaning of someone (audience) doing the favor of watching her. moraitai is volitive of morau.
6 'to' is used to quote what she thinks. X to omou means X : (I) think -> I think X
 

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でも、実 は また ロンドン で も MOAMETAL 当たってしまいました。
demo, jitsu      wa               mata    rondon     de      mo        Moametal   atatteshimaimashita.
[but] [actually] [again] [London 1] [

1 there is only 1 sound in Japanese that's neither r nor l, with our characters it's written r
2 here I guess 当たる [あたる] ataru means 'something happend to' but it has meanings like 'hit' 'strike'. te-form + shimau means something (usu. unwanted) happened without your control. shimaimashita is formal past of shimau.
 
何か モノ を 踏んでしまって 足 を とられて...
nanika      mon            o                      fundeshimatte               ashi    o                     torarete...
[something] [object,thing] [direct obj. particle] [accidentally-stepped-on 3] [foot] [direct obj. particle] [be-taken 4]
 
3 again the te-shimau form, see note 2
4 足を取られる ashiotorareru means to stumble, the te-form ashi o torarete means (I think) that she left the sentence 'unfinished'
 
lol lots of typing for such a short text to translate ^^ I hope there are no typos or other mistakes
byebye

[SunLight]

I've found a nice channel on youtube with 5 mins small lessons

example:

 

if someone knows some cool youtube videos about Japanese grammar and how to build sentences, plz share

 

I think vocabulary and kanjis are best learnt with srs software like Anki, but when it comes to grammar or word usage, video lessons are less boring than books ^^

 

now I'm watching these ones while I write kanjis... multitasking ftw

 

おまけ (omake) -> extra bonus content

 

old, but still funny every time I watch it