Translations aren´t making any sense / Using LingQ as a beginner

Hey there,

I´ve been studying japanese for a few days and I really start to love the language :slight_smile:
There´s one problem, though…

A lot of times, when I translate each word in order to understand a phrase…the result looks rather funny:

“わたし は さおり と いい ます” - I [topic marker] Saroi with good to be.
“わたし は はるか です” - I [tp] great distance am.

My favorite:

“どうぞ よろしく おね がいし ます”
Go ahead well mountain ridge foreign language newspaper (something verby)

How am I supposed to understand any of this? xD
And more importantly, what should I do now?

Should I learn some grammar first? Should I just ignore phrases I don´t understand and concentrate on what I do understand? I could ask for translations on the forum, but I guess opening 5 or more threads a day would be a little too much.

Some of you guys seem to have learned Japanese to a decent level (Julz?Dooo?Iri?), so I hope that someone will be able to help me out :slight_smile:

I think after a few days, not understanding some stuff is not something to worry about. I would just ignore the stuff that I don’t understand. Anyway, I push you the thumbs.

“Anyway, I push you the thumbs.”

I guess you´re thinking in German now, good job :wink:

“わたし は さおり と いい ます” – My name is Saori.
“わたし は はるか です” – I am Haruka.
“どうぞ よろしく おね がいし ます” – Nice to meet you.

Google (Internet) translations are not correct, especially for japanese. I would recommend to acquire a small grammar book or a textbook for beginners in order to get basic notions, and after or simultaneously to use LingQ’s dialogs. I think it can help much in understanding.

Hopefully I can be of some help:

The word splitter LingQ uses tends to divide kana up more than it should. This is part of the reason you’re 3rd phrase translates so strangely. For example, I don’t think 「ます」 is a word… it is a morpheme maybe? I don’t know, I’m not a linguist. Anyway, what it means to the language learner is that ます needs to be connected to the preceding word. The whole word would be おねがいします and translates as “please”. The other reason that phrase translates so strangely is that it just doesn’t directly translate well. It is probably best to think of that whole phrase as “Nice to meet you” as geseno pointed out.

Another thing that might help is looking at the kanji version of a lesson you are having trouble with if it is available. Kanji often makes the meaning of a word more clear than when it is written in only kana. For example, your 1st phrase could be written this way:
私はサオリと言います。

Suddenly the meaning of いい becomes more clearly 言い “to call”. So you get your translation of “I am called Saori.”

I would recommend the following dictionaries as well:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1C

The first one is a bit better at finding expressions (such as よろしくおねがいします) and uncommon words. The second is probably a bit better when you’re first starting out because it can often guess the root form of a word, making it easier to search.

I agree that google translate is less reliable with Asian than with European languages. Paule, I would rely on our user Hints for the meaning of individual words and switch my dictionary language to English since there will be more Hints to English. Just let yourself gradually get used to how the language works.

We have over 380 beginner lessons in our library. Roughly half of them are beginner one. Many of them are excellent. Around 60 of them have translations into English. Check the resources filter to find them. I don’t think you can find as complete a collection of beginner material for Japanese, with audio and text, anywhere.

@Iri

I´m not a fan of “normal translations”, I prefer to translate everything word-for-word…the result might not be “good English”, but it gives interesting insight into the logic and the structure of the language. Anyway, thanks for your ideas :slight_smile:

@Steve

I use English-Japanese dictionaries and English user hints on LingQ anyway :slight_smile:
Another positive side effect of doing that is, that I´ve learned quite a lot of English words that way.

The biggest problems seems to be, that I doesn´t always “detect” the words correctly. Cgreen described the problem pretty well. I wonder if there´s a way to solve this problem.

@Iri

Have you ever heard of “All Japanese All The Time”(AJATT)?

“You have to kind of get a sense of how the word is used in different contexts.”

Yeah, I guess “an insane amount of exposure” might achieve that.
That “large lenght husband”-stuff looks interesting. Learning Japanese will be an interesting experience. ^^

I´ll just try different “techniques” to see how exactly I´m going to learn it. I find the difficult aspects of Japanese pretty exciting, actually :slight_smile:

@Paule - in regards to detecting the words correctly, it is just something I’ve learned to do with practice. It is a bit easier to detect where the word boundaries are when the text is written with kanji. This is because most words will fall under a few basic forms:

Only Kanji:
言葉

Kanji+Hiragana (kanji comes first):
食べます

Hiragana or katakana only:
その
パソコン

Other forms exist but I would say the above forms will get you started because they are the highest frequency.

@Iri, Steve, CGreen

Thanks for all these helpful answers :slight_smile:
It´s 3am in Germany btw…time to get some sleep.