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Re: Japanese in 18 Months? No way!!!

Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2011 10:06 am
by larethian
City/Capital of Lilies?
not sure how beautiful that is.

Re: Japanese in 18 Months? No way!!!

Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2011 10:32 am
by Mystes
And this? :まつろわぬ神

Re: Japanese in 18 Months? No way!!!

Posted: Tue Aug 02, 2011 5:39 am
by Cosmic Eagle
Zell_ff8 wrote:All inside the brackets acts as the subject. Its a noun phrase, with the main noun (root) being 彼氏. All the rest is additional information about 彼氏, not about the apple or how he peel it.

It's a good exercise for reading comprehension, specially on long sentences where you need to identify where starts and where ends each sub-sentence (the exercise being removing all seasoning elements and reducing it to its minimal expression -the OUTER sentence-, once you understand the broader action, start analyzing the included sentences and giving more details).

In the case of my example what you need to identify at first is that minimal expresion, "he peels an apple", then you go back adding the elements, "the boyfriend of my sister peels an apple", then "the boyfriend of my sister who graduated last year peels an apple" -> "the boyfriend of my sister who graduated last year peels skillfully and carefully an apple" -> "the boyfriend of my sister who graduated last year peels skillfully and carefully the apple I bought yesterday".

Japanese can have really, REALLY long sentences. You need to be good at recognizing sentence structures. I remember on the novel 人間失格 a sentence of almost two pages. A single sentence of over 30 -vertical- lines.
When translating ultra long sentences, do you all normally break it up into several English ones? I do that usually but not sure if it's standard practice

Re: Japanese in 18 Months? No way!!!

Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2011 10:27 pm
by Zell_ff8
Cosmic Eagle wrote:When translating ultra long sentences, do you all normally break it up into several English ones? I do that usually but not sure if it's standard practice
Haven't done it on english, but in spanish I usually translate 1 ultramegajap sentence (i.e. 2pages long single sentence) into 5 or more mid-long sentences, but I try to maintain the same flow as in japanese. It may be an extremely long sentence, but in japanese you can sense that endless narration and linking the ideas one after another. Spanish doesn't have as many connectors as japanese, but overusing commas I got the same effect.
I usually split when there is passive voices or quotations at it can get confusing.

Re: Japanese in 18 Months? No way!!!

Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2011 11:26 pm
by larethian
for me, it depends on how long. but mostly it depends on what the author's intention was. strangely, I feel that sometimes the author wants the reader to read a sentence in one breath by making it long and taking out the commas which could have been placed. stupid as it sounds, I'll replicate that with commas and semicolens, and using 'who', 'whom', 'that', 'which' to add in characteristics for the subject and objects which were given as the insanely long conjugating modifiers. though if it becomes nonsensical and overly ambiguous, then I'll split it.

Re: Japanese in 18 Months? No way!!!

Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2011 7:20 pm
by SkyFlames07
Zell_ff8 wrote:
Cosmic Eagle wrote:When translating ultra long sentences, do you all normally break it up into several English ones? I do that usually but not sure if it's standard practice
Haven't done it on english, but in spanish I usually translate 1 ultramegajap sentence (i.e. 2pages long single sentence) into 5 or more mid-long sentences, but I try to maintain the same flow as in japanese. It may be an extremely long sentence, but in japanese you can sense that endless narration and linking the ideas one after another. Spanish doesn't have as many connectors as japanese, but overusing commas I got the same effect.
I usually split when there is passive voices or quotations at it can get confusing.
I'm wondering, are you from spanish language origin?
And the other thing... I'm slowly plasming japanese on my head, a word at the time. It may look stupid but I'm studying as I studied english (colours, animals, body parts, etc) Wondering which kind of sistem you used to study it? Because althought it doesn't seem as impossible as it was when I started, myself traslating japanese look like a faaaaaarewell dream.

Re: Japanese in 18 Months? No way!!!

Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2011 6:02 am
by Mystes
SkyFlames07 wrote:myself traslating japanese look like a faaaaaarewell dream.
Same here.

Re: Japanese in 18 Months? No way!!!

Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2011 8:14 am
by Cosmic Eagle
At least that's better than me who can read and write it but can't handle himself in verbal conversations beyond a few short sentences and floundering like a retard...

Speaking is infinitely more difficult and scary than reading, writing or translating written texts for that matter.

Re: Japanese in 18 Months? No way!!!

Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2011 8:19 am
by YoakeNoHikari
I can agree with that. I started speaking Japanese with my piano teacher, and I really hate repeating myself, but I think I have more of a problem with speaking so softly nobody can hear me rather than pronunciation. Having words completely escape my mind is a problem too.

Practice~~

Re: Japanese in 18 Months? No way!!!

Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2011 8:37 am
by Doraneko
Maybe it's just me but I find speaking one of the easiest parts of Japanese when compared to anything else (listening and writing) except reading. It is well known that Japanese has a relatively simple system of pronunciations. Moreover, native Japanese are used to listening to dialects anyway which at times have radically different grammar and accent placements. So even if you are a bit off in terms of pronunciation or grammar, most of the time that won't affect communication. There are not many languages that are so lenient and forgiving in this regard.

Try tonal languages like Mandarin or Cantonese for a change. There is no way the other party could understand you even if your tones are just slightly off, as what you are actually saying ends up being drastically different from what you are trying to say. After all, one single wrong tone completely changes the meaning of a phrase. That's why even a sympathetic native will appear unforgiving to foreigners struggling to speak the language.

I know I have been repeating myself, but I have spent 20+ years in Mandarin, have stayed for months in China, and as of now I still fail to reach a satisfactory level to claim being "conversational". Btw I am pretty good at Chinese reading and writing so vocabulary knowledge and etc is not an issue to me.

As a comparison it took me around 1 year taking weekend Japanese classes in community colleges to become comfortable in speaking in Japanese on general daily stuff. Another 1 year forward I was already sitting in an office in Tokyo translating English documents into Japanese for my English-challenged colleagues, while chatting with them on the differences in accounting standards between Japan and my home city.

Re: Japanese in 18 Months? No way!!!

Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2011 9:15 pm
by larethian
Maybe it's just me as well, for me, I find reading easiest, followed by speaking, listening, and writing.

For reading, of course I have all the luxury of time to decode, or check the dictionary. Though I normally find the sentences more complicated than normal speaking sentences; of course, since I don't speak the way books narrate most of the time.

For RL listening, my problem lies mainly in fast speech, which feels slurred to me. Anime, and school senseis, on the other hand, speaks slower than all the other RL japanese I know, so it's much easier to understand an unsubbed anime and senseis than most other RL people. And back in the days I was studying (2000-2004), I used to watch unsubbed and then subbed anime, so I'm more or less used to listening. I score the highest in listening compre segment of JLPTs and mock exams. These days, I like to watch mostly unsubbed anime on himado.in.

The main problem with speaking I have is sometimes, I can't find the word which I know that I want to use. It simply just doesn't come up when I need it most. Though I also get 誤用 issues, but it's only apparent to me when friends are willing to correct me. (I actually bought a very thick 誤用 dictionary which describes most misuse cases made by foreigners, but I have yet the time to delve deeply into it though. It's an interesting 'learning by mistakes' reference.) Other than that, like what Doraneko said, I do get my point across (despite all the 誤用 I get), since I don't use overly long sentences, I guess.

Writing is much worse, since firstly, all the issues I have in speaking are inherited into writing. Secondly, my longer sentence composition can be 'off' sometimes, with the root of the problem attributed to my weakness in てにをは. There are a few times when what I use as a subordinate clause for one subject can get linked to another subject at times for a moderately long sentence, much to my chagrin. In fact, just recently, I bought a rulebook for てにをは, which explains in detail such things. Hopefully, I get better at this.

Re: Japanese in 18 Months? No way!!!

Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2011 9:30 pm
by Cosmic Eagle
Personally, I find speaking and listening go hand in hand. Since the only time I ever speak Jap is to interact with Japanese people....you get your point across eventually of course, but its like, you wish to say more but cannot since the words escape you at that point and as it isn't nice to let the other person wait too long for you to rack your brains, you go for the simplest description you can think of...And their machinegun replies don't help make it easier of course.

I find SG people speak the slowest actually. Like our English may be near native level, but we don't speak it as quickly as a Japanese speaks Japanese or a Beijing person speaking Mandarin...

Re: Japanese in 18 Months? No way!!!

Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2011 10:39 pm
by Zell_ff8
I'm generally a low self-esteem person, so I'm not confident at my level of japanese. But I managed to get paid to translate, and it seems I'm able to deceive my readers as I'm not getting any complaints, so I think at some point I got to understand japanese :3

I think I wrote about my studying methods once on this forum. It's been a while now I don't "sit to study", but I started quite intensively, always with self-study. Just surfing, grabbing books and practicing writing A LOT (now it's almost half a year I don't handwrite japanese -I write in the PC with the godly IME-). But I had times of 12hs of study (in one day). I sat for JLPT to measure my skills, first year I passed almost manten 4k, second year 2k, third year N2 and now I signed for N1 but I hardly doubt I pass it since I haven't been studying.

I find reading quite easy, far from natural but almost the same level as to reading english, except I have less vocabulary and need to have a dictionary at hand.
Second I find easy listening (got 100% on the listening section at N2 last year), I have to thank anime and visual novels for that xD
Third writing and last speaking. But in fact I never practiced RT speaking. But I did choose japanese for its sounds, as all japanese sounds are included in spanish so its really, really easy to pronnounce. What's more, even hepburn romanization is almost a spanish phonetical transcription of japanese, so a spanish speaker reading something in romaji will spell it almost like perfect japanese naturally (just the H and the J are like in english, but in general the sounds are the same, even the vowels, あいうえお are spelled "a i u e o" in spanish, while for english speakers its "a as in ah, i as in we, u as in woo, e as in get, o as in old").

Anyway I'm going to japan next week (I got a grant from JF to assist a cultural and language course) so I'll experiment oral communication for the first time :#
I hope all this study actually shows its benefits

Re: Japanese in 18 Months? No way!!!

Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2011 2:06 am
by rpapo
Zell_ff8 wrote:Anyway I'm going to japan next week
Lucky you!

Re: Japanese in 18 Months? No way!!!

Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2011 7:22 am
by Doraneko
Zell_ff8 wrote: I sat for JLPT to measure my skills, first year I passed almost manten 4k, second year 2k, third year N2 and now I signed for N1 but I hardly doubt I pass it since I haven't been studying.
You will be doing fine for N1. Frankly the gap between JLPT4/N5 and JLPT2/N2 is much larger than the gap between N2 and N1 and you have already overcome that. Moreover you have been exposing yourself to Japanese everyday on a professional capacity for years. :)

I took JLPT4 after a few months of study, the next year JLPT2 and the following year JLPT1. I studied very rigorously for JLPT2 (not much different from your 12hr/day good old days :lol: ), due to the large amount of stuff I needed to catch up. But JLPT1 was a bliss.