Home Forums The Japanese Language Understanding a correction in lang-8

This topic contains 2 replies, has 2 voices, and was last updated by  Juan Larroucau de Magalhaes-Calvet 10 years ago.

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  • #46777

    Hey guys, had a correction in Lang-8 I would like to understand:
    私は毎日読みだ。  was corrected to 私は毎日読んだ。

    The other one is a phrase i knew from advance it was going to be wrong, it was just an experiment to see how it went and well, went really bad XD. I wrote this:

    日本語を話したいために日本語の本を読みます

    That was corrected to:

    日本語を話すために日本語の本を読みます

    But my japanese was so horrible she didnt understand what i wanted to say. What i wanted to say was something like: “the reason of my desire to speak japanese is to be able to read books in japanese”. Can anyone fix my sentence to say that?

    #46779

    thisiskyle
    Member

    I’m not sure what you are trying to say with your first sentence, but here are some guesses:
    I read (present tense) everyday. – 私は毎日読みます。(polite) – 私は毎日読む。(casual)
    I read (past tense) everyday. – 私は毎日読みました。(polite) – 私は毎日読んだ。(casual)

    I see a few problems with the second sentence, only some of which really have to do with Japanese, the other is with English.

    The sentence you wrote in English (that is, the idea you are trying to convey in Japanese) doesn’t really make sense. You say you want to learn to speak the language in order to read it. Why not just learn to read it? I understand what you mean, but the haziness of the sentence makes it harder to translate into Japanese. So let’s first start with a more clear sentence: “The reason I want to <b>learn</b> Japanese is to become able to read Japanese books.”

    There are a few errors in your sentence that lead to it not making sense. So much so that even the correction is not right. (It;s grammatically correct, but conveys a different meaning than what you intended.) Instead of trying to correct your sentence bit by bit (that would get confusing) let me give a few alternate sentences and rough-ish translations.

    日本語の本を読みたいなので、日本語を勉強しています。- Since I want to read Japanese books, I’m studying Japanese.

    日本語を勉強するわけというのは、日本語の本を読めるようになりたいのです。 – To speak of my reason for studying Japanese, it’s that I want to become able to read Japanese books.

    日本語の本を読むために日本語を勉強しています。- In order to read Japanese books, I’m studying Japanese.

    #46791

    The first sentence had as target this one: 私は毎日読む。But while I was typing this and other things in the text I suddenly decided to go casual (originally it was 読みます) and, without to much care, didnt realize it was a verb and simply changed です for だ, it was a stupid mistake. I was expecting that correction although when I saw 読んだ。I ended up absolutely clueless because today I’ll start studying informal past tense, now I understand with your explanation.
    Talking about the second sentence, I had 2 problems:

    1.- I didnt know part of the grammar so it was a bet to see If I could come up with something more complex
    2.- Didnt want to keep on using the verb 習います which I have used too much and with 話します I didnt mean to literally talk in the language but to master the language (like when u ask to someone: Hey, do u speak spanish? You ask him if he knows the language and not if he can talk only).
    But at the end it seems to have gone worse than if I just kept on using 習います hehehe.
    The perfect sentence I wanted to say is the third one u posted and I see my japanese itself (gramar and such) wasnt so horrible after all.

    Thanks a lot for the corrections

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