Having been a relay operator for a few years, this is true even in English. You might be able to guess what someone is saying (and the floor managers always encouraged trying to) but you’ll never have 100% accuracy and it’s far less confusing to the person getting the “translation” if you don’t have to make any corrections by actually waiting for the person to finish their sentence.
Trying to parse that in that backwards order makes my brain hurt.
Haha, you could also read this as someone speaking in a way where he constantly interrupts himself–like a really excited little kid.
“I–the hotel is across the street from this store, and in there, I saw this suit I want to try on!”
Japanese is a really fun language, I thoroughly enjoyed the classes I took before my depression swallowed me up for a bit. Absolutely reccomend, it’s only about half as scary as it looks–the syllabary is not difficult to remember, and Japanese is a decently structured, ordered language. The main challenge is expanding your vocabulary, and keeping track of Kanji.
Lol try slavic languages and hungarian where the word order is extremely flexible. Ive always had a hard time translating between hungarian and english even tho im basically native in both of them. For example “A kutya kergeti a macskat”, “A macskat kergeti a kutya”, “Kergeti a macskat a kutya”, “Kergeti a kutya a macskat”, “A macskat a kutya kergeti” and “A kutya a macskat kergeti” are all valid and mean the same thing but the emphasis is on a different part of the sentence. Kinda insane from the perspective of english where “The dog is chasing the cat” and “The cat is being chased by the dog” are the only valid orders and even that is cheating as i would translate the second one a bit different into hungarian because once again the focus changes. Also there are a lot of things in common speach that i dont know how a translator would translate. In hungarian for example we have a ridiculous amount of curse words and combinations that are simply lost when translating. “A ménkű csapjon bele a jó dagadt gecis faszszopó román kurva anyádba” is something(or idk it was similar to this) i have actually heard from a real person in a real conversation. I wont translate it becauase its extremely vulgar but you get the point. The other thing is, returning to japanese for example, there are a few things that can be represented in one language but not in another one like honorifics for example. Last thing is when translating without context pronouns probably get completly lost. How would an ai looking only at the text know who the “you” was aimed at. Especially when translating to languages where even you has different forms depending on gender for example. All things thatll have to be solved i guess.
This Japanese interpreter did a TEDx talk about her work. She mentions a few issues with going between Japanese and English, like how subjects in Japanese are often dropped from sentences, so she once made the assumption to give a CEO a male pronoun only to find out that the CEO was female when she walked in the room shortly after.
The interpreter also says that you can’t wait to have all the information about a sentence to start translating, so she likens it to “watching a thriller” because you don’t know whether the verb at the end is “going to negate the whole sentence”.
“That’s so cool… NOT.”
But an entire language like that.
That’s literally how negation works in Japanese lol
What if you take the speculative execution strategy and have multiple interpreters translating every possible semantic branch and then throwing out the recordings of the interpretations that were incorrect? 🙃
Can’t wait for the Spectre/Meltdown exploit.
Why would you do that?
You have to wait for the last work in the sentence anyway so doing extra calculations to throw out later isn’t making it faster.
American anime fans know you can get by with saying the English word plus “ZUUUUUUU!”
I’ve often wanted a direct literal translation in the subtitles.
Like, I want my subtitles to read
I hotel from the street across that’s a shop I saw a suit on try want to.
Because then at least I can learn to understand “Watashi” is self-reference, and match up the phonetics with the words.
Transliteration of individual characters is a surprising good way to understand/learn Chinese. A colleague of mine once read the whole Tao Te Ching this way.
I love this idea!
The translation isn’t as direct as the lines in the image imply though. “Watashi wa” becoming “I” hides that “wa” is a grammatical marker for the topic, kind of, of the sentence. More complete it’s like, “I, as the topic of this sentence”. You end up with a direct in place translation of “I, as the topic, a hotel’s across the street, as a location, a shop, as a setting, exists, saw a suit, to which, wearing as a desire, is true”
One of my favorite passages from Mark Twain’s “The Awful German Language”:
There are ten parts of speech, and they are all troublesome. An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech – not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary – six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam – that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each inclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which reinclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it – after which comes the VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb – merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out – the writer shovels in “haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein,” or words to that effect, and the monument is finished. I suppose that this closing hurrah is in the nature of the flourish to a man’s signature – not necessary, but pretty. German books are easy enough to read when you hold them before the looking-glass or stand on your head – so as to reverse the construction – but I think that to learn to read and understand a German newspaper is a thing which must always remain an impossibility to a foreigner.
That use of punctuation is both beautiful and horrifying.
“Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz fachsimpeln haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein.” 🥰
To be fair, we have compound words in English. Firefly, sunflower, etc… if you get into latin prefixes and suffixes joined with root words, you can create some incredibly long words.
“Subpostactuallismian.”
Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft.
The Association for Subordinate Officials of the Head Office Management of the Danube Steamboat Electrical Services.
German is on another level when it comes to compound words.
We can’t forget antidisestablishmentarianism
prime sesquipedalian word
Ah the joy of learning Japanese as an English speaker. Oh you learned all the hiragana? Bro there’s katakana and kanji. Oh you don’t know the kanji!? BRO. Have fun learning how to look those bad boys up using radicals!
Don’t forget about all the Chinese words thrown in for good measure!
I had thought about learning some Japanese but after seeing this, I’m doubting I could.
Spoken Japanese is not insanely difficult for English speakers, although it is more difficult than Romance languages.
If you try to learn to read and write, you’re in for a world of pain. Probably 3 years of working on it several hours a day. In fact, even Japanese people are losing the ability to write by hand, because it’s easier to type in the phonetic words and have the computer figure out which characters to use.
If i were to real time translate, it would be something like: I went to a shop across the hotel, I saw a suit there, and I wanted to try it on.
More like:
My hotel’s vicinity, within it there is a store where I saw a suit that I want to try on.
It doesn’t say anything about going to the store and it is in the current tense of wanting to try on something that you past-tense saw within the subordinate clause.
Is it odd that I want a whole website of these charts where I can compare the way many many different languages translate the same sentence and see the lines between the meaning components in them?
If you find one, please share with the rest of the class. That would be cool to see.
Japanese particles.
Particles are used together with words to mark their grammatical role in the sentence.
私(は) - I (subject)
ホテル(の)向かい(に) - hotel (possessive) across the street (to)
(お)店(で) - (just makes the sentence more formal) shop (in)
スーツ(を) - suit (object)Fun thing about particles is that word order is a lot more flexible compared to English. As long as the right particles are attached to the right words, you can sometimes* swap around the order of these words and still be grammatically correct.
What are the last two characters?
I don’t speak a lick of Japanese but I found this online:
です is used to mark words as polite if they cannot conjugate to show politeness themselves… です is one of the most fundamental words in the Japanese language. It’s super useful — it can be attached to just one other word to form some basic sentences. It’s also quite safe to use since it’s part of the polite form, so you’re unlikely to offend someone with this word… です can be tacked onto the end of a noun, な-adjective, or い-adjective to form a polite, positive, present tense sentence (say that ten times fast 😉). In other words, it allows us to talk about something that is true, and relevant to the present moment and/or the future—all in a polite way of course.
So it’s bitte for Japanese?
Ja
While the other answer is correct and more comprehensive, in this phrase the particles are purely used to make the phrase “polite”. Take them out and the phrase is semantically correct and has the exact same meaning, but it can now only be used in an informal settings (between friends, family, …)
Disclaimer: I have only basic knowledge of Japanese, and my Japanese teacher would enthusiastically confirm.
It bothers me that “desu” (the last two characters) aren’t pointing at the period at the end of the sentence.
I lived in Japan for 3 years and took an elementary Japanese college course from an old Japanese lady while I was there. She always described “desu” as an audible period mark. Formally declaring the end of a sentence. Simply adding it to the end of a word can turn it into a full and complete sentence.
As other comments mentioned, removing it makes the sentence less formal, which is fine with friends and family. There are several ways to speak Japanese depending on who you’re talking to. Whether it’s a friend, a lover, your boss, a stranger… there are several variations of politeness/formality to the language, which makes it very difficult to learn how to speak properly.
“Desu” is pronounced “dess” (don’t say the “U”) in traditional dialects. Or if you’re from Southern Japan, their “southern drawl” includes pronouncing every single character, so you’d pronounce it “de-soo.”
Desu sort of means “it is”, but it is a sentence ending formality.
It’s the Japanese copula
a copula is a word or phrase that links the subject of a sentence to a subject complement, such as the word is in the sentence “The sky is blue” or the phrase was not being in the sentence “It was not being cooperative.”
That’s a tricky one. I guess it sort of means “it is that” if you take it super literally? “It is that I want to try on the suit.” But in practice, it just adds a level of politeness and formality to the sentence.
You will hear a lot of masu (ます) and desu (です) tossed in there all over the place when people are trying to be courteous.
It would be better to have a layer in between. That layer would consist of concepts.
E. g. “I” <-> self-reference & object <-> “watashi”
or “I” <-> self-reference & subject <-> “watashi wa”.That’s how translation software often works.
How the fuck did I learn Mandarin but this confusing the fuck out of me.
Mandarin has the same subject-verb-object as English, generally
