Looking up the meaning of 派手な（はでな） I came across what I thought was an interesting sentence. Possibly a bit played but if you ever want to sound like Ali G in Japan why not give it a go?

彼女、パーティーに派手なアクセサリーをたくさん身に着けて来たよ。

(source: ALC)
Translation on link.

Bling bling..? =P

That was an interesting site. =P
Not quite me thought.. =P

Remember that ALC is the work of a bunch of translators, mainly translating from English to Japanese. That means that the Japanese sentences are often more explanations than examples of real in-life use.

If you look up 犬 you get words like 'bone-eater', 'bowser', 'dish-licker', 'tripe-hound' and so on. The nuance of these expressions (many of which I've never even heard of!) most certainly does not exist when you use 犬.

For this reason, the sentences on ALC need to be taken with a grain (or 3) of salt. These days when I look for example sentences, I tend to use the green goddess instead. The sentences in it are natural Japanese sentences chosen by Japanese people working on the dictionary, and only later are they translated into English. It's an expensive dictionary, but I think it's worth it if you're serious about studying.

I agree with resolve. A classic case of where the English comes first rather than the Japanese, making it next to useless for us. Looking at it from a Japanese person's point of view, I think that page doesn't do a great job of describing the meaning of the word. I don't think it mentions the circumstances that the word comes up in, which is a recipe for inappropriate usage. I can just imagine some poor Japanese person doing a homestay and using the word with the host family. "I really like your necklace. It's truly bling bling."

Jim Breen's example sentences suffer from the same problem although not as severely. Many of them are originally Japanese but there's no sure fire way to tell.

Resolve: I'm very interested in purchasing the dictionary you mentioned. Does it have information about the sources of the Japanese sentences? You said that they were chosen by Japanese people but does it contain any info about where exactly they make their selections from? Does it specifically say that none of the sentences are originally English?

Maybe I'm just easily amused but I think it would be hilarious if my wife told my mum she wears nice bling!

I'm actually sitting in the staff room laughing out loud just thinking about it!

re: resolve's point, I wasn't aware of a percieved lack of quality in ALC's sentences. I quite like them. Incidentally, in cases where things "don't translate" they seem to indicate that fact but provide they way one would say <X>. I'm sure I can dig up some examples of this.

Yeah, it would be hilarious.

synewave Wrote:I wasn't aware of a percieved lack of quality in ALC's sentences.

Me either, could you provide an example of an ALC Japanese phrase or sentence that is unnatural in Japanese? I have been following it rather blindly at the recommendation of my Japanese tutor as a good source for "words in action". Alternatively could you provide a source that explains why it is not good?

When you have an example sentence pair, what's for sure is that one of the sentences was the original and the other is the translated version of that original sentence. The question is which one came first. Resolve says that on ALC, the English one is always the one that's translated.

The above example certainly fits this rule. I think most people would be hard pushed to feel that "bling" was the most appropriate word to use when translating 彼女、パーティーに派手なアクセサリーをたくさん身に着けて来たよ into English. What is obviously the case is that the entire page that synewave referenced has been written with a view to explaining the word "bling" to a Japanese person. (And in my opinion, it only does half a job)

Therefore, the author has at best taken English sentences with "bling" in them, and translated them into Japanese. At worst, the author has made up the English sentences and then translated them. In either case, the usefulness of this to a learner of Japanese is limited. What you are seeing is a translation of a sentence with "bling" in it. You're not seeing an example of a sentence that might turn up in Japanese. It might turn up in natural Japanese but it might not.

Look at it the other way. If you were to look up よろしくお願いします then one possible translation might be "I put myself in your care". This has perfectly good English grammar, it translates reasonably accurately but you never hear people saying this in English. A Japanese person could not say "I put myself in your care" in the same situations that he or she would say よろしくお願いします.

What I would dearly love is to have in Japanese what the Oxford English dictionary uses for English. It has an enormous corpus of English language usage that is taken from newspaper articles, books, films, emails, radio and just about anything as far as I'm aware. You can look up a word and see thousands of examples of real life usage of that word. It would be brilliant to have a facility like this in Japanese.

Check it out and find some more links here: http://www.askoxford.com/oec/mainpage/?view=uk

By the way. What do you think about "denshi jisho" and it's example sentences? Are they natural japanese?

http://jisho.org/

I rely quite heavily on it.. =/

For french speaker, there is this small book:

Du Tac au Tac Japonais: with 800 real sentences that people can say in everyday life.

http://www.amazon.fr/Du-tac-au-Japonais/...459&sr=1-1

alantin Wrote:By the way. What do you think about "denshi jisho" and it's example sentences? Are they natural japanese?

According to their site, they use data from the WWWJDic project which I mentioned earlier. It's hit and miss. I've corrected quite a few example setences for them. Some are originally Japanese and some aren't. Take a look at this link to find out more:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjd...#examp_tag

As you will see, most of the examples come from the Tanaka corpus. Follow the link on that page but I've copied in some of it here:

Quote:The page provides some brief documentation for the Tanaka Corpus of parallel Japanese-English sentences, and in particular the modification and editing that has been carried out to enable use of the corpus as a source of examples in the WWWJDIC dictionary server and other systems.

The corpus was compiled by Professor Yasuhito Tanaka at Hyogo University and his students, as described in his Pacling2001 paper. At Pacling2001 Professor Tanaka released copies of the corpus, and stated that it is in the public domain. According to Professor Christian Boitet, Professor Tanaka did not think the collection was a very good standard. (Sadly, Prof. Tanaka died in early 2003.)

Compilation
Professor Tanaka's students were given the task of collecting 300 sentence pairs each. After several years, 212,000 sentence pairs had been collected

From inspection, it appears that many of the sentence pairs have been derived from textbooks, e.g. books used by Japanese students of English. Some are lines of songs, others are from popular books and Biblical passages.

The original collection contained large numbers of errors, both in the Japanese and English. Many of the errors were in spelling and transcription, although in a significant number of cases the Japanese and English contained grammatical, syntactic, etc. errors, or the translations did not match at all.

So you can see that many sentences come from English sources. Also, there are many mistakes. Not very reliable.

Ok.. I think I'll ditch the sentences that I have included in my Anki deck and start only using sentences that native Japanese speakers post to mixi.. I have used it only for a couple of days now and chatting with people there is a tremendous help!

wrightak Wrote:I think most people would be hard pushed to feel that "bling" was the most appropriate word to use when translating 彼女、パーティーに派手なアクセサリーをたくさん身に着けて来たよ into English.

Fair enough but it doesn't necessarily follow that the Japanese sentence is unnatural (don't know if that's what you're saying) just that the translation may be "iffy".

Yeah that's true. I wasn't saying that it was unnatural. It might be, it might not be. But what seems clear is that it was created in order to translate a sentence with 'bling' in it. My point is that if the sentences you study are always those that have been created for the purpose of translating English, then it's not very good for learning Japanese.

It certainly can be interesting to look at sentences like these. It's interesting to see a Japanese person's attempts to translate 'bling' (I found it funny), and it gives you clues as to approaches you could use when trying to express English concepts. Although, to be honest, my philosophy with Japanese learning is like this: "What would a Japanese person say in this situation?" and not "What do I want to say in this situation and how do I translate that into Japanese?" In other words I try, with varied success, to be and think like a Japanese person. Therefore I don't find translations of English into Japanese that useful in my Japanese studies.

Going back to the sentences, I guess it's just important to remember that these sentence "pairs" aren't really pairs at all. It's more of a one way relationship. i.e. if you translate a sentence once and then get someone else to translate it back again, there's no guarantee that you will be back where you started. In fact, for concepts that don't translate, like よろしくお願いします, there's no way you could possibly find a matching pair.

To sum up wrightak's point: These aren't things that a Japanese person would necessarily say of their own accord, but rather what a Japanese person would say to convey an English sentence to another Japanese person.

I think it's a good point and this is the reason that I don't advise reading Japanese translations of English books after the beginning stages. No matter how good the translation is, it's always an attempt to fit English into Japanese, and not a writer expressing Japanese thoughts in Japanese.


In this particular example, the Japanese translation sounds like a completely ordinary sentence and doesn't capture the ghetto-fied feel of the original at all. If I had to translate it back into English it would be something like,
"She arrived at the party wearing some flashy accessories."

In this way, ALC can mislead its users to thinking they've unearthed the Japanese word for "dish-licker," when they're actually walking around saying いぬ.

I hear that Fabrice is considering some kind of upgrade for the site involving sentences. Any news Fabrice?

wrighttak: Re the sources of sentences in the green goddess: From http://old.jat.org/jtt/gg5review.html :

Quote:The strongest point of the new GG is its example phrases and sentences. While some examples have been carried over intact from the previous edition, most were newly written or revised for the new edition by native Japanese editors chosen for their knowledge of and feeling for Japanese. It is not easy to create short yet typical and illustrative examples of word usage, and many times I was struck by the naturalness of the Japanese examples. The examples were translated by native speakers of English, and our translations were checked for accuracy by Japanese editors. As one of those editors remarked to me, thanks to its wealth and variety of examples, the dictionary is valuable not only as a look-up tool but also as a book to be browsed and read at length.

alantin: the sentences in eijirou need to be taken with a grain of salt, but I wouldn't say they are completely wrong. Eijirou is very useful too and I actually bought a copy to use offline. You just have to be aware that often they are translating from English, and thus the sentences may be grammatically correct, but not carry the same nuance or may be a bit awkward. The sentences are still useful for demonstrating how a given Japanese word is used in context.

Yeah. Well.. If they are awkward then why bother to learn them by heart. I think someone said something profound like "good Japanese comes from mimicking good Japanese". Might have been the guy at alljapaneseallthetime.com..

I don't have so many sentences in my deck anyway..

I will still be referring to the example sentences in denshi jisho thought. I find it an extremely useful tool!

resolve Wrote:These days when I look for example sentences, I tend to use the green goddess instead. The sentences in it are natural Japanese sentences chosen by Japanese people working on the dictionary, and only later are they translated into English. It's an expensive dictionary, but I think it's worth it if you're serious about studying.

On Bitme, the description for GG is something to this effect: if you don't know what it is, you don't need it, at least, not yet.

alantin: the translations in eijirou were at least written by professional translators. many sentences are not awkward, they are just not necessarily the most natural thing a japanese person would say. 'denshijisho' uses the tanaka sentences as far as i know. The tanaka sentences are on the whole less reliable that eijirou!

megaqwerty: i think that's very silly advice. gg is useful to anyone who has a basic understanding of Japanese and wants access to basic sentences. whoever posted it on bitme is misleading people.

I can second green goddess - its a great source of examples. You type one word in and you can bet theres enough examples to get the gist. Perfect if you like remembering words in context such as AJATT method.

What i really want to do though is to buy a japanese to japanese concise dictionary where the definitions and eytomology of the various words/phrases are explained as short as possible like the sanseido online dictionary. I think that along with its own example sentances will give me a better understanding of a word rather than trying to find its exact match in english as sometimes it doesnt exist or at least not perfectly.

Damn, expensive is right. It is listed at $495 on amazon!

suffah Wrote:Damn, expensive is right. It is listed at $495 on amazon!

I think that's the fourth edition. The ISBN for the fifth edition is 4767420261, at least as far as I can tell from looking around. Here's an amazon.jp link for it http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E6%96%B0%E5%92%...16&sr=11-1

Hmm, you are right, plus the 4th ed uses romanji. That's bizarre to me.

The EPWING (online) format is about 16,000yen