Help in Translating Japanese
June 16, 2011 4:15 AM   Subscribe

I have a Japanese friend whom I occasionaly write e-mails in japanese. I used to study Japanese at the University but as I didn't practice for a long time I almost forgot it. Sometimes I don't know how to write something in Japanese and internet Dictionaries doesn't help. So the question is if anyone know good internet communities or forums where I can get help with translating some bits into Japanese? Thanks!
posted by Svulya to Writing & Language (7 answers total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
can you give an example of an internet dictionary "not helping"? Then I can answer your question
posted by Infernarl at 4:23 AM on June 16, 2011


Response by poster: "can you give an example of an internet dictionary "not helping"? Then I can answer your question"

Yes, for example, i know words but I don't know how correctly to put it in the sentence and wish to ask someone for advice.
posted by Svulya at 4:39 AM on June 16, 2011


Try lang8--it's set up as a personal blog that you write in Japanese (or whatever language you want to learn) so that native speakers can correct it, but people often post letters or essays or whatnot to be corrected. It's a Japanese site, so there are lots of Japanese speakers and posts in Japanese usually get corrected pretty quickly.
posted by sunset in snow country at 4:44 AM on June 16, 2011


There is no shortcut to memorizing the basic grammar. If you would like to do that here is a great guide: Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese

I'm sure you know about Google Translate. Make your sentence simple. A good way to check if your sentence is correct, or commonly used, is to paste it in to a regular Google web search. For example the English "this is a pen" gets 41,700,000 hit's and the incorrect English "this are a pen" get's 1,450,000 hits. This is also useful for checking the spelling of katakana words.

WWWJDIC has example sentences for a lot of words. You can copy from there as well.
posted by Infernarl at 4:51 AM on June 16, 2011


The forums at Wordreference are great -- I've never used their Japanese section, but they are extremely helpful in French, at least, so I would assume Japanese is as well.
posted by Judith Butlerian Jihad at 5:09 AM on June 16, 2011


You want The JapanesePage.com. Full of nice friendly and helpful people. If you can go for a reference, The Kodansha Communicative English-Japanese Dictionary comes in very handy at times.
posted by zengargoyle at 5:50 AM on June 16, 2011


Japanesepod101.com has a pretty good forum. It's free to sign up for the basic level.

(The podcasts are really well done, too, with accompanying pdf lesson guides.)
posted by ctmf at 8:57 PM on June 16, 2011


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