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Post by bakudon on Feb 12, 2014 1:09:55 GMT -5
日英 can be used to point to Japanese-British relations in general, whereas 和英 means Japanese–English in the context of languages, 英 here coming form the word 英国 ”UK”. Actually, I wouldn’t think of 日英 pertaining to languages at all, because 和英 is usually used for that, but I guess Yukito will be able to give you a better assessment.
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geishaboy
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Post by geishaboy on Feb 12, 2014 2:53:17 GMT -5
I work as translator, and job postings are always either 日英 or 英日, however the dictionaries I use are either 和英 or 英和. It's just a little oddity I've noticed. Although every now and then I see 和英 or 英和 used in the context of translation.
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Post by Yukito on Feb 12, 2014 3:19:31 GMT -5
Actually, the difference is more political than anything else. It depends on what language dictionary you're using, but generally when it comes to language, 和 is generally preferred over 日 for several reasons, but this not always the case. (For various reasons 日韓 is preferred as a dictionary term. You generally won't even see 和韓, unless it's referring to some sort of creative endeavor.) 日英 generally refers to historical and political contexts, such as a treaty, conference or organization, while 和英 is generally used for language, but sometimes for cultural contexts. For instance, at my college, we had a 和英文化祭, or Japanese-English cultural festival. The reason you see 日英 used for translations is because 和英 is an accepted word for dictionaries, 日英 is an abbreviation of 日本語>英語. In this case, it's really only standing for the first two characters of the involved languages. You may not be aware of this, but even less well-known countries without a kanji culture get kanji nicknames. (It's a remnant of World War II censorship forbidding the use of foreign words. If you're interested in the kanji names of countries, you can find a list here: %E3%81%AE%E6%BC%A2%E5%AD%97%E8%A1%A8%E8%A8%98%E4%B8%80%E8%A6%A7)" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9B%BD%E5%90%%E3%81%AE%E6%BC%A2%E5%AD%97%E8%A1%A8%E8%A8%98%E4%B8%80%E8%A6%A7) But only rather well-known countries get one-kanji abbreviations used to refer to them. So France is 仏 and Russia is 露. So you'll see that as an abbreviation for the languages, even though they're official spellings are フランス語 and ロシア語, but for convenience we'll shorten it to 和露 or 仏和 or 日露 or 日仏. Which is used more commonly depends on the speaker (do they know the standard? If not, they'll just use whatever, which is why you might get confused sometimes) and the context (political, historical or cultural and language-oriented). You're more likely to see the sun kanji used for translations for the aforementioned reasons. So it is actually slightly incorrect to say that 日英 means relations between England and Japan, because the term has been corrupted from frequent misuse (kind of like regardless vs. irregardless or the usage of "I digress" and similar issues in English) and now 和英 can also mean that, though less frequently. The reason you see it more in dictionaries is because 文部科学省 or the Ministry of Arts and Sciences keeps a strict tab on issues of kanji usage and the people who put together dictionaries naturally follow the guidance of the 文部科学省. There's even a handbook several hundred pages long all of us journalists use to keep track of these issues of kanji usage. Can you tell what I studied in college?
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geishaboy
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Like that movie Drunken Master, minus the kung-fu
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Post by geishaboy on Feb 13, 2014 6:58:51 GMT -5
Can you tell what I studied in college? Was it "How to be awesome 101"? Seriously, you're an asset to this forum. I did know about the country abbreviations, they stare me in the face every morning when I read the newspaper. I threw me off at first "really? Rice is having talks with Morning Dew. WTF?" I have slowly gotten the hang of it though. But don't get me started on kanji usage in newspapers, I sometimes wonder if Japanese native speakers even know how to read those outrageous kanji compounds. Also, that's interesting about the Ministry of Education (and culture and sports and science and technology) having that much control over kanji usage, although it does make a lot of sense.
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Post by justjustin on Feb 13, 2014 13:03:02 GMT -5
All this in-depth language talk is getting me fired up. I finally cracked open one of my Japanese textbooks for the first time in years! I am armed with the following: Dictionary of Basic Japanese GrammarPretty essential if you want to understand how words are inflected. I studied abroad in Osaka and lived with a homestay family. I'd flip through this brilliant book and pick up all sorts of cool ways to communicate so I didn't feel quite so much like a mentally stunted 5-year-old when I talked with them. It has clear explanations and multiple example sentences of commonly used grammar patterns. I highly recommend it from personal experience. The magical thing is you do not need to know many words to make good use of this book; it's all about the feeling behind the words. For vocabulary we have... Kodansha's Furigana J-E DictionaryIt's a dictionary, but it's geared towards learning the language and not just for reference. Every word has an appropriate number of example sentences following it to help understand how the word is appropriately used. You can look up words in English alphabet order or Japanese alphabet order. (Probably optional) Kodansha's Dictionary of Japanese ParticlesBeginners (actually, anyone at any level) can be the source of much entertainment by misusing particles-- those (usually) short, non-inflected sounds that can mean the difference between eating dinner and being eaten by your dinner. Read this enough and perhaps, one day, you will live in a world where inanimate objects do not move by themselves. I rarely used this book while I was in Japan, as instruction in class and textbooks enforced proper use of particles well enough, but I recognize how helpful this book is once learning on your own. If it's cheap I would recommend it. When it comes to reading and learning Kanji, I don't really know what to recommend. I feel like learning Kanji will be a lifelong activity using whatever means necessary. I have the Genki textbooks I and II that cover about 300 of them, I took all the tests in class and did well, but-- wow-- I forgot just about all of them. However, here is what I have in addition to Genki: (Probably optional) Essential KanjiIt is literally just a list of 2000 Kanji with readings, common usage and stroke order. The index is organized by stroke count and shape, so some knowledge of writing kanji is required to use this book. I can't specifically recommend this because I never really used it that much and there's nothing about it that stands out as the epitome of kanji instruction. So, this is just one option. I hope my recommendations help. And thanks to this thread I got back into Japanese a little bit. If I can ignore the fact I currently live in a soul-sucking suburban cultural wasteland and keep reminding myself I want to live in Japan again, maybe I can find the motivation to continue learning on my own!
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iwant
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Post by iwant on Feb 13, 2014 16:08:04 GMT -5
Yeah, the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar is a must-have book. Too bad it's expensive as fuck, I actually had to go to a specialized store in order to get it new for less than €50/$70.
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Post by Purple Moss on Mar 5, 2014 17:06:53 GMT -5
I'm also interested in learning Japanese, it could be useful with my future career. I haven't really checked or tried anything else besides the already-mentioned Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese, and I have been going very slowly through it. Very.
The issue I have at this early stage is picturing Japanese words in Japanese instead of the Latin alphabet, so I hope that comes naturally as I drill and drill.
Personally, I think that a language with syllabaries and thousands of characters is quite 'inefficient', so to speak. But it's all like a fun puzzle, and it's intriguing.
Anyway, I don't have much to share at this moment, but I'm looking forward to more goodness from this thread.
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Post by justjustin on Mar 5, 2014 18:20:33 GMT -5
It's good you're going through it slowly. Tae Kim's no-frills guide is very dense and concise, so whipping through it would make it hard to remember anything. Beginners will have to be proactive in finding ways to reinforce and practice the material learned. I think his site says something to that effect, anyway. I definitely recommend following it, though, so you aren't led astray. As someone who took classes for a few years and studied abroad in Japan I can safely say it's a good foundation; it's all correct and highly corroborated. In fact, when reviewing grammar I prefer to use it over my old Genki textbooks. Getting used to recognizing Japanese characters is the first big hurdle to get over. But, like you are doing, just keep drilling them over and over and you'll feel comfortable with them. The floodgates will open and you can begin teaching yourself more effectively. Speaking of teaching yourself, don't forget to check out Tae Kim's "resources and tutorials" section: www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/resources
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Post by bakudon on Mar 6, 2014 2:33:37 GMT -5
I guess writing systems in general have progressed from pictographs to to phoneme-based alphabet, as the latter are more universal and much easier to learn. Of course, I can see why users of a language would not be inclined to divide their writing systems to units smaller than the smallest morphemes in their language.
The problem with Japanese (and Chinese) as well with this is that the language contains a ton of homonymes, which makes Japanese written in latin alphabet hard to read, especially if it has lots of fancy words (this is basically the reason why the Chinese gave up on writing their language wholly with latin alphabet). Using kanji also incorporates a layer of communication (related to the choices of individual kanji etc) which is lost when writing on phonetic systems.
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Post by cambertian on Mar 6, 2014 17:05:14 GMT -5
I was bored one day and decided to try and learn some Japanese. I don't think I am any good with language, let alone foreign language (Je ne parle pas français, par exemple,) but I was optimistic considering my good English writing grades...
I barely remember anything. Maybe one or two romanji. Absolutely none of the actual symbols. Something's wrong.
With a western language, which I'm used to, you have cognates or neat little tactics to remember words. I don't know if it was the website or what, but I don't have any of those.
Do you guys have preferred reading material? Sayings? Phrases? Concepts?
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Post by justjustin on Mar 7, 2014 11:34:05 GMT -5
I barely remember anything. Maybe one or two romanji. Absolutely none of the actual symbols. Something's wrong. Don't worry, just ditch romaji as soon as you possibly can. Sticking to the Japanese characters will help enforce correct pronunciation. With Japanese, each character represents a specific sound (with a few exceptions you'll learn later). This is obviously not the case with English, so reading romaji will trigger all sorts of weird imaginary sounds that don't exist or aren't used often in Japanese. For example, you already made one small mistake and wrote romanji. If you saw the Japanese characters you would not have made that mistake and written romaji (well, unless your finger slipped!). But even writing romaji still doesn't express how to pronounce the word because it's a long "o" sound. So it might be better written as roumaji or roomaji, but you still have no idea how to pronounce it since there are so many possibilities with English. If you're just starting out, don't worry about grammar or learning too many words until you memorize the sounds and the characters associated with them. I wouldn't recommend moving on further until you're comfortable with the entire "writing systems and pronunciation" section: www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/complete/writingSpend as much time as you need drilling until you're comfortable with the sounds and hiragana characters, then continue.
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Post by bakudon on Mar 8, 2014 3:27:02 GMT -5
The more professional option to mark long vowels (which I advise English natives to pay special attention to) when sticking to Hepburn latinisation would be using macrons (”rōmaji”).
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iwant
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Post by iwant on Mar 8, 2014 10:03:39 GMT -5
Speaking of roumaji and long vowels, does anyone know why it apparently never applies to proper nouns like cities or people's names? I only ever see "Tokyo" and "Ryuichi Sakamoto" where really it's supposed to be written as "Toukyou" and "Ryuuichi".
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Post by bakudon on Mar 9, 2014 1:49:19 GMT -5
It’s just sloppy writing, most writers don’t bother to check the spelling and pick the names from wherever. After all, you won’t notice anything amiss unless you actually know Japanese, and many seem to think that in general, any accents, circumflexes or whatnot are useless fluff that is oh so hard to generate from the keyboard. But there’s no rule that says that general guidelines of romanisation don’t apply to names as well.
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geishaboy
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Like that movie Drunken Master, minus the kung-fu
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Post by geishaboy on Mar 9, 2014 22:19:54 GMT -5
The irony here is that what started out as sloppy writing has long become the industry standard. Seems both Tōkyō and Tokyo are acceptable, but Toukyou isn't. Go figure.
And while I guess you could overlook this for things like newspaper article translations and the like, you would hope that textbooks of all things would properly show elongation.
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