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The best way I could recommend looking at this is to go to Jisho.org, get the jisho.org bookmarklet, then highlight the word as you’ve typed above, and then click the bookmarklet, it will then come up with a small window with the meanings.
For instance the first vs you have.
うまい ｖｓ。 おいしい
おいしい is
delicious; tasty; sweet
but うまい can mean
1: skillful; clever; expert; wise; successful;
2: delicious; appetizing; appetising;
3: fortunate; splendid; promisingI think also you should remember that The vocab is following the 80:20 rule. or 20: 80 rule, 20% of stuff is use 80% of the time, or whatever it was, so うまい is most often used to mean delicious. Other meanings are more obscure.
Also check out how many different ways to write it, I guess its probably written in kana alone most often, maybe the kana form is generally taken as delicious.
Also don’t forget that in English we have synonyms as well, thats how we know the theosaurus existed. Quite often there are more than one word we can use, although the differences can be subtle. Same in japanese. Some might make you sound snooty, some might be more polite than others. Make a note in your Japanese learning log about stuff like this so you can ask someone, maybe a Japanese person, or a Japanese teacher, or something, or some other Japanese learning place or make it into a journal entry and post on Lang-8, you’ll often get it corrected and learn some stuff about what you post.
Usually w is ウイ ui, like in french oui.
But yes the transliteration of words can be a little tough, the whole r/l thing makes words like “rule great”. ルール… *mind blown*
Its pretty easy until you try and shown off your skills by transliterating zero wing and then fall on your face *sigh*
Interesting Factoid time!
Did you know that there are many more combinations of sounds in English than in Japanese? Its true, and is one of the reasons why there are so many homophones in the language. Its also why its hard to transliterate English into Japanese with some resemblance of the original word. I forget where I read this, I tried to find the source which had numbers attached, was it in Textfugu, was it in one of the books I’m working through, or a website I read…
One thing to consider is the whole pitch accent thing, when you listen to Japanese you’ll hear inflection changes in some words and not in others.
Consider the word rule above. ルール。
How do you even make that sound like anything? Well apart from the first ru being held for two beats you also change the pitch for the second sound. So you have two ways to inflect ru, which allows you to say rule without sounding like you’re a train. If you can inflect every sound high and low you’ve just doubled the number of sounds you can use, woo yeah, thats the trick to working out homophones in speech, kanji is how you work them out in writing! (Of course accepting that there are exceptions as always :P)Its useful to be aware of the pitch variations, and the way to extend the vowels, as these nuances are really subtle but really hard to get right, at least for English speakers, but in a be aware but don’t sweat it, you’ll just go oh right, I see eventually. way.
Things I learned from watching Anime #2897. In Kaleido Star the protagonist Sora does her best in the spirit of “try it rather than think about it.”
So sometimes you need to worry about stuff less and everything will work out in the end if you try your hardest.
When you’re new to Japanese and just learning, a lot of the answers are just to keep learning and you get the hang of it by learning more, it would be really nice if there were solid rules to follow or some easy way to learn it all, but theres no such thing as something thats easy.
But thats the point we choose to learn Japanese, not because it’s easy but because it is hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.がんばって
Rhino Spike!
Get some kata kana words like テレビ、etc. and submit to rhino spike and you should get some very nice japanese people to do some recordings for you.
That is all.
うぃんどう !!! ヘルプ !!!
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/8787/20120523152148.png
Are these translations really optimal?
The clock is rad though.
You may not consider yourself a writer but you certainly have a way with prose, I don’t know what prose means but it sounds fancy.
Everyone has to start somewhere with Japanese or writing, you just need to keep going, writers that make it to be paid by people to write stuff are those who don’t give up, they produce enough mountains of questionable content, but they keep trying and working until they create something they feel is not bad. ( Of course its important they have someone to make them stop their futile striving for perfection and actually publish something)
This is actually the secret to everything whether writing, Japanese, or , Keep going with Japanese, keep going with writing, just keep going and one day you’ll suddenly realize you actually got good.
Here’s a cheese cake I made with giant strawberries, they came from Morocco and were crazy firm, strawberries should be soft fruit and easily smushed by cycling home with them in your bag, but these were strangely firm. They weren’t even strawberry shaped they were like siamese strawberries. That crazy Morocco Mole! I wasn’t very happy with the base on the cheese cake but turns out aslong as its got at least 80% sugar content people will eat it.
http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/739/ichigoichigostrawberryp.jpg
Oh I like cake by the way.
Extra Bonus for people on a diet.
http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm17901162
You can skip the second bit. You’ll know what I mean
I kinda feel Japanese OS translations aren’t trying hard enough, surely there has to be a way to say Window that isn’t in katakana, don’t they have windows in Japan?
That said I could probably get a job doing localisation, how easy is it to just transliterate into katakana!
メイヌ スクレヌ タヌ オッン。
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This reply was modified 12 years, 5 months ago by
vlgi.
Maybe you could say さるじゃありません。With so many things not being monkeys its a more versatile phrase!
Good luck!
Were the strawberries too big, or was the cake too small?
http://img849.imageshack.us/img849/3735/littlekeikilensflare.jpg
@hey I have a Japanese PSP, its a first gen one and you can change it into English if required the charger takes 110V or 220V and came with adapters, not sure if they changed what came with the PSP after the first gen though.
Oh this looks like a cool resource.
http://www.kanjiclinic.com/introsurnames.htm
Heres a wiki article on the jinmeiyo kanji
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinmeiy%C5%8D_kanji
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This reply was modified 12 years, 6 months ago by
Not really :p, try playing around with jisho.org,
If you want to go for meanings, choose meanings and look them up on Jisho.org.
Lets see Andrew means…
The word is derived from the Greek: Ανδρέας, Andreas,[4] itself related to Greek: ἀνήρ/ἀνδρός aner/andros, “man” (as opposed to “woman”), thus meaning “manly” and, as consequence, “strong”, “courageous”, and “warrior”.
So stick some of those in Jisho.org
Sticking in Strong gives some results for Strong man, maybe that seems a good fit?
Now you want to think how it sounds, and whether its any good. Maybe try sticking the hiragana into jisho.org and see if there are any similar homophones with bad meanings…
I think the ultimate test would be to ask a real or several real japanese people how it sounds.
However always take their responses with a grain of salt as most won’t come out straight off and tell you if its bad, I’d say unless its an obviously positive response its suspect.
Now I don’t really know much about name kanji used in Japan, and there are probably better ways of doing this.
As you can imagine its a bit of a landmine which is why its generally recommended to go with katakana at first, once you’ve become adept at the language you’ll probably know a lot better how to do it yourself.
I usually only get to about the third chapter of anything before I lose interest and do something else. So I like to use loads of different sources.
There is nothing desirable about this state of affairs.
Ultimately do what works best for you but don’t be afraid of getting friendly with jisho.org.
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This reply was modified 12 years, 5 months ago by
