question for those literate in Japanese
Apr. 18th, 2009 04:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oh_darling(Pardon the sheer sillyness of the question, please.)
When reading a script, how are you able to tell when the characters of one word stop and the next begins? Is it in the particles?(*really hopes the answer isn't "you should just know"*)
Love,
a moron <3
Post Script -- Translating would be ten thousand times simpler if I didn't have to keep stopping and scratching my head over this. :P
When reading a script, how are you able to tell when the characters of one word stop and the next begins? Is it in the particles?
Love,
a moron <3
Post Script -- Translating would be ten thousand times simpler if I didn't have to keep stopping and scratching my head over this. :P
no subject
Date: 2009-04-19 12:49 am (UTC)If it's a movie script/novel then it should be little markings like this: 「 」
But if it's a manga then it'll be in the balloon closest to the character.
That might have been as awkward as you felt asking that. I hope it makes sense. If that's not what you're dealing with just let me know and I'll see if I can help.
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Date: 2009-04-19 01:41 am (UTC)I meant that if you have a sentence written in Japanese (katakana, hiragana, and kanji), how are you able to tell which characters belong together when you translate it into romaji?
(It's for a manga. Your answer made perfect sense, but it was for a somewhat less awkward question than mine. xD)
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Date: 2009-04-20 03:50 am (UTC)There's not really any 'rule' for it. You just know. Like if someone were to write a sentence in English that was all squished together, you'd be able to pick out which letters go together to form words.
If you can show me the page you're working on I can help. :)
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Date: 2009-04-22 03:12 am (UTC)Hmm, I see. Well, I suppose I'll worry more about then when it comes time to actually translate the romaji to English. I'll probably have to familiarize myself with the grammar a bit more first, though.
Ah! Very kind of you to offer~ :)
At this point in time, I think I'm going to try and get down the raw script and romaji first, in hopes that it will make translating easier later on. If I get to the actual romaji-to-English bit and have loads of trouble, I'll gladly take you up on your offer, though! Thanks! <3
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Date: 2009-04-22 04:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-22 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-19 12:57 am (UTC)Uh...yeeaaaah, you just know, usually. ^_^; Or sometimes in the case of people like us who don't always know all the words, 'because a longer word wasn't in the dictionary so it must end here,' or, once you get more practice so you've got a better feel for the language but your vocabulary is still sometimes greatly lacking (*me*) 'because I think that's a good place for that word to end, don't you?' Often when you're reading not-too-complicated stuff though, nine times out of ten there will indeed be a particle in between.
But even when they are all mooshed together...does it make it that troubling? Or are you using a dictionary that makes you look up the exact word? Cause that would have driven me nuts when I was learning and can still drive me to irritation now. (If you're using an online one I most often use Jim Breen's Japanese-English Dictionary (though the English-Japanese is kind of awful ^_^;) and that one, if you look up a word that doesn't exist (if you say accidentally looked up two words mushed together) it will just keep dropping off the final kanji/hiragana till it finds a word that does exist.
Also if you're reading something in a web browser or that can be opened in a web browser (sometimes I mail word documents to myself and open them as html documents from the email so I can use this ^_^;), there's a Firefox add-on that will instantaneously look up any word you roll your cursor over and give the definition in a tiny box. ....It's absolutely horrible, I'd never learn any new words if I didn't have my manga. But how can you resist something so easy?
PS: Did you get 75% off Peeps? ^_^ I like how all the sugar makes them kind of crunch outside, but I prefer Cadbury Cream Eggs and the strawberry..fluffy cream eggs. Mmmm. Actually I've had so much now that I'm getting kind of sick of sweets, but I kind of want to go try to find more Cadbury eggs to freeze....but they're probably mostly all bought up now, anyway. :(
PPS: Just out of curiosity, how much Japanese grammar/vocabulary knowledge do you have at the moment, anyway? ^_^
no subject
Date: 2009-04-19 01:58 am (UTC)*snorts*
That's sort of what I've been guessing at, just dropping off syllables and the like, but if a dictionary does it for me, that's fabulous! Thanks! 8D
(Unfortunately this is a doujinshi, and I don't know how complicated it is yet... because I move reeeeeeally slowly. Even more slowly thanks to the sound effects. [Any idea what "zosatsu" might mean? It should be something at a construction site, and it's been driving me crazy. I'll probably wind up dropping out sound effect translation because of it. Dx])
Right now I kind of having everything open. I've got kanji dictionaries, romaji-english dictionaries, sound effect dictionaries, cultural/grammatical reminders, Wikipedia... Ah, Japanese is so much more difficult than German. <3
Hmm, Firefox you say? I'm not a huge fan, but if this were from a browser, I'd gladly give it a go. (The answer is that you can't.)
P.S. -- No, BUT I WISHHHHH I DID. (I don't think marshmallows are supposed to be crunchy, dear... :O) If we're thinking of the same Cadbury Eggs [The ones with a hard candy shell and chocolate inside?], then those are my second favourite! I haven't heard of those strawberry things but now you've gone and made me want to try one.
Pretty much the only straggling candies at my house are the chocolate rabbits. ;___;
P.P.S. -- Honestly, none. :D
Basically I figured it couldn't hurt to try, and so I've looked this and that up rather spottily. I found some good informative places with regard to grammar, and the rest I look up as I go. xD
My process is basically this: translate into romaji [Easy enough... I'm not half bad at scripting!] and work from there. The reason for this whole question is the mass of syllables that the translation into romaji gives me which sort-of kind-of doesn't make sense.
How did you learn what you know about Japanese? (Were you taught, or did you kind of just plunge in like me?)
[Ah, also, nice to hear from you~! How have you been? <3]
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Date: 2009-04-19 03:23 am (UTC)Ooo, do you know German? I don't know anything about German but I took a class on Old English and we learned about all the cases and stuff and they make my brains hurt. I think they said German has them too? I'm not sure how similar it is, but now the idea of learning German scares me, heheh.
PS - I hold that the sugar gives the outside of the marshmallows a slight crunch. With the Cadbury eggs they do make chocolate filled, but the standard has a plain filling...vanilla flavored, I guess? With yellow dye on part of the inside to make it look like it has a yolk. ^_^ For some reason I haven't seen the strawberry things in bigger grocery stores. Mostly just places like Walgreens. When I was little the rabbits fascinated me, but now I don't care for them since I like filled things. ^^ My friend knew how much I liked Easter candy so she got me a basket....only she filled it with lots of the things like the chocolate rabbits, chocolate kisses, etc. I pretended to like it of course, but....I felt so bad, cause you know she spent a lot on that and...I don't really care for that stuff. Hahah, she tried so hard.
PPS - Hahaha, AWESOME. If it's a doujinshi I assume it's got no furigana? Ouch, how do you look up your kanji? Just reading things with hiragana was enough for me when I started, heheh.
I had Japanese classes in high school and college, but none of them went above 2nd year level. But the classes weren't really very good, and mostly the best thing about them is the pressure to keep going/study. ^_^; I started reading manga cause I was bored with the classes, but even in the cases where I knew all the words and grammar necessary a lot of the time it was still bewildering because the sentences/phrasing was rarely as straightforward as you get in textbooks/classroom, heheh. So...it felt a lot like plunging in without knowing anything, even though I DID know things. They were just...things I could have semi-easily looked up like you are, and a lot of what I needed to really understand at a decent speed I just had to learn through practice. ^_^;
How am I? Haha, at this very moment, I am quite good. By the end of Monday, I will probably be miserable. ^_^ I applied to the JET program, got an interview, and recently heard I didn't get the job but got an alternate position. So if someone drops out........only I can't depend on that. T_T (Supposedly in past years most alternates have been offered the job eventually, but...not a good year for optimism, methinks.) While waiting to hear from JET I was just applying for temp work (and never getting any ^_^;) cause I didn't want to get a good job and then just quit it if I got JET. But I can't wait around forever, so I'm going to start applying to real jobs Monday. I intended to start this Monday, actually, but I had lots of paperwork and stuff to do to accept the alternate JET position, and I was...excessively good at finding excuses why I couldn't start job hunting after I got my JET errands done for the rest of the day. ^_^ But I made sure to run out of excuses this week, so THIS Monday... Ugh, I HATE job hunting.
But I'm in a good mood cause yesterday I just released 5 chatpers of manga I scanned, translated, and edited entirely by myself. ^_^;;; (note: If you do make it through learning Japanese, I don't suggest you try this. At least not at the rate of a chapter a week. *asplodes*) It was a series that was started and dropped by another group ages ago, so I'm getting lots of 'Whoa! I never thought I'd see another chapter of this again!' comments and they make me smile. ^___^ *bubbles* Hahah, I so need a job.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-19 04:02 am (UTC)I'm trying my best, but some of them just make no sense
and would be a total pain to edit out anyway, so I'll probably wind up dropping translating them.I'd always wondered how the people who translate/edit manga professionally feel about their jobs... :D
This'll be my second year, which isn't that much relative to the years of English if you consider it, but I've actually learned quite a bit! I like German. Sensible language.
...Sort of. <3
YOU TOOK A CLASS ON OLD ENGLISH? (*eyes light up*)
P.S. -- Vanilla flavoured? Now that's something I'd love to eat! E-Except for the part where you mentioned them being coloured like eggs... for some reason the thought of hard-boiled eggs makes me slightly green. :/
Well, it's the thought that counts, and she certainly put in effort.
P.P.S. -- Alas, I haven't encountered any yet. :'D
It's not as bad as I imagined. I have a pretty good memory for things if I write them down, and so long as I take a break from squinting at all the kanji [after a while they all blur together...], I'm okay. I'm using two websites which both have different organization and features. I like the one 'cause it has biiiiig pictures and simple translations, but the other is organized by radicals, which is much more helpful.
Ah, I see! It seems like nothing can truly prepare you for Japanese, huh? xD
JET? As in, JET (http://www.jetprogramme.org/)? (Or is that the wrong acronym? xD) It sounds like it could be very exciting if a position opens up, and if not, I wish you the best of luck with finding some other engaging job you like!
D'aww~ <333 *sparkly pride*
I COULD NEVER DO THAAATTTT. I'm so slow, lol. And I haven't even started thinking about translating to English... then I'll be making the tortoise look like a racecar.
(Haha, I doubt I'll ever "learn" Japanese... at best, I might just have katakana and hiragana drilled into my skull after hours of staring. Kanji wouldn't work so well, I fear... (Maybe I could do Grade 1? xDDD))
no subject
Date: 2009-04-19 09:14 pm (UTC)It's where I learned about Þorn!
So, well, yeah, was linguistics emphasis, after all. (Plus the lady who taught it was absolutely brilliant and hilarious and taking her classes was often like just going to school to watch a very informative comedian for an hour. ^^;) But there was only enough...er, resources to offer one class on it, so they focused less on actually making us really able to understand it without notes and more just...able to...understand how it works and the history? Was fun, though. Though way too much info for me to be able to retain even parts of it very well. :(
I'm okay. I'm using two websites which both have different organization and features.
Do you ever use the Windows Japanese IME thing? It has a 'pad' that lets you draw the kanji and then it looks it up for you (even if your handwriting is crap like mine...not to mention drawing-with-mouse skills). Sometimes it will have a hard time getting the right one if you don't use the right stroke order, but I didn't know anything about stroke order besides 'start at the top and work down and right', when I started using it and it worked ok. ...Then using it pretty much taught me correct stroke order, so it just kept getting easier. ^_^; Still have to use the radical search for the crazy ones that blur together sometimes, though, but usually the ime is a lot faster for me.
JET?
Yeah, that one. Sorry, a disproportionate amount of my friends (thus pretty much anyone who I talk to at any length ^_^;) are people who've taken Japanese classes, so I start to forget it isn't as well known among...uh, normal people.
Kanji wouldn't work so well, I fear... (Maybe I could do Grade 1? xDDD))
Lots and lots of things have furigana so you can be lazy and don't have to learn kanji at all! ^_____^ The thing I'm translating now has furigana. If it only had kanji I probably would not have been able to go at the rate I am, hehehe. Like most if not all shounen and shoujo manga tend to have furi I think. It's the stuff for older people and doujinshi that don't (though doujinshi tend to have...grammatically simpler sentences a lot of the time? So I guess what's less confusing to start with depends on which you'd rather have, hehe.)
Good luck!
no subject
Date: 2009-04-19 09:41 pm (UTC)(Sounds like loads of fun! I wish my teachers were that interesting...
Did you ever have to dress up like the writers of old?)...I NEED THIS. NOW. 8D *starstruck*
Any idea of where to look it up, or does it sort of float around on the Internet like the rest of IMEs these days?
I'd have the stroke orders all wonky, I suppose, but it would probably be easier than browsing through the whole darn dictionary on the website each time! xD
Haha, that's alright!
I'm sure there's loads of times where I start blathering and everyone is too confused to stop and ask me what the heck I'm saying.
I AM JEALOUS. LIEK WOAH.
*siiiiigh~* Unless it's one of those metaphorical, really deep doujinshi...
which I really don't think I'm doing right now. xDDDI should probably go out and buy a Japanese dictionary if I ever do get serious about it though. :P
Thanks! I'll be needing it. <3
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Date: 2009-04-19 11:38 pm (UTC)Sadly, no dressing up. Though I hear that professor would always take a part in the English department plays as something ridiculous like a swamp monster. *wanted to see so bad* Damn, I miss that woman.I'm not sure, but don't think I even had to download anything through a website or anything. I think I just looked up instructions and followed them and Windows did the rest. Easy stuff. Some seem to be here: http://www.coscom.co.jp/japanesefont/inputjapanese/installime.html
Hahaha I DON'T EVEN KNOW HOW TO USE A PHYSICAL KANJI DICTIONARY. For serious, never learned. And I pretty much don't use my vocab dictionaries, either. *loves on her computer*
no subject
Date: 2009-04-19 11:45 pm (UTC)Our German teacher periodically dresses up in the traditional clothes for kicks/holidays. It's always a blast~Hmm, I'll give it a look. :D
Then how do you look up kanji? Those applications?
Lol, I should have gone with Chinese. I have some Chinese dictionaries... (I should have gone with something Chinese about RESTAURANTS, and then I'd be totally covered. [/has a whole book for that])
Computers rock. <3
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Date: 2009-04-20 12:08 am (UTC)...On the other hand, my first Japanese teacher took a whole bunch of old, funny smelling clothes to class one day and made US dress up and put on a 'fashion show.' ...He was definitely the best of the...*counts* 6 Japanese teachers I've had.
Yeah, those are all I use for kanji. Lol, a book...full of Chinese food? *starts getting hungry*
no subject
Date: 2009-04-20 02:59 am (UTC)Oh my! :O
We did something similar in German (twice actually) for when we were learning the parts of clothing. You didn't just have to suffer through wearing the clothes, you had to name and describe them all too while dying of embarrassment! xDDD
Something about 'The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters,' I think. But I have a bunch of Chinese cookbooks too, haha! I love chinese food~ :3
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Date: 2009-04-19 05:22 am (UTC)I mean- literate? me? Pffft.
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Date: 2009-04-19 05:51 am (UTC)If I can do it, so can you! xD