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Hello, everyone!
I am having trouble coming up with words for my passion list, and was hoping to get some legitimate suggestions. Because Jesus and Christianity are things around which my entire life revolve, I was hoping to think of some words that I use a lot in conversation concerning those topics. However, most of the words I originally used are hard to find translations for since Japan has less than 5% Christianity. Can anyone help me?
- Catherine
I had a lot of trouble with my passion list too. I think my main problem was over thinking it. Which I tend to do a lot! I feel that may be part of your problem. Remember that you are still in the beginning stage and the sentences you might want to make might not be possible right now based on what you haven’t learned yet. Try not too jump too far ahead of yourself. Also try to think of more nouns than anything for your list. (Maybe more objects than anything) So bible would be a good one, you could even use Jesus Christ. You’re using these nouns in the future to help you to make sentences. Then you’ll build on that to make more complicated sentences.
1. Jesus Christ -> iesu kirisuto -> いえすきりすと(Hiragana)-> イエスキリスト (Katakana)
2. Bible -> baiburu -> ばいぶる (Hiragana)-> バイブル (Katakana)Hope This helped you in anyway! Good luck!
There are translations of the Bible into Japanese – I have one on my iPad, albeit the New Testament only, because getting the OT costs money. There’s no shortage of Christianity-related words in Japanese. If you want pointers on how to translate them, just ask.
Incidentally, another word for bible is 聖書 (せいしょ) – I honestly don’t know whether the kanji word or the katakana word is in more common usage, but the iPad app uses the kanji word.
Fun fact: Christianity’s actually been in Japan for so long that it pre-dates the use of katakana for foreign loanwords, so キリスト has a kanji equivalent: 基督, pronounced the same. It’s obsolete, though, so I wouldn’t worry about memorising it. =)
If you aren’t sure which vocabulary would be best to put on the list, you can google both of them and see if one is considerable more common than the other by looking at which gives the most results. For me 聖書 gives 1,310,000 results and バイブル gives 2,740,000 results on google, so I would choose to learn バイブル rather than 聖書.
If it is difficult to look up, you can use wikipedia. E.g. if “The Holy Spirit” was a difficult word to look up you can go to the page on wikipedia about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Spirit
In the menu to the left you can find the article in other languages. In and click on 日本語 (日本語 means Japanese in Japanese). Then you get to the Japanese article about the holy spirit. There you can see the heading is 聖霊 (which means “The Holy Spirit” in Japanese).I hope this helped. Good luck.
Thank you for the suggestions! I probably was over thinking by trying to have a variety of word types (ie. verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc.)
Wow, I never knew that! I have a Japanese Bible too, so I can probably use that to come up with words. That’s a really great idea.
Koichi mentioned google searching for commonality too, but I didn’t think of using Wiki in Japanese as an alternative resource to Denshi Jisho for translations. Thanks!
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