Done How do you say

[Monky_O]

"i can't see"
"i can't see at all!"

in japanese...

?

 

[Ju-da-su]

見えない (Mienai)
全然見えない！ (Zenzen mienai!)

Can change depend on lots of stuff, like speaker's tone of speech, context it's used it, etc... .-.

 

[Monky_O]

so what does 'mattake mien' mean

 

[Ju-da-su]

You mean "Mattaku Mien"? -.-"

Also "I can't bearly see a thing"...Mattaku means "completely", and Mien is one of the spoken language dervied from Mienai (There are tons of them, depend on a lot of things), which means "can't see". So, it basically means the same thing. Whichever one you like...-_-"

 

[mikkih]

I can't see at all.
Standard: 全く見えない (Mattaku mienai)
Standard: 全然見えない (Zenzen mienai) - less formal than above
Kansai Dialect: 全く/全然見えへん (Mattaku or Zenzen miehen).

"Zenzen" is less formal and colloquial than "mattaku."
見えん Mien is generally a male spoken word for 見えない mienai. (Exception: Yoruichi in Bleach.).

Additional info:
A sentence with mattaku and zenzen should finish with a negative word "ない　nai" just like the examples above, but there is a new trend to use these words with an affirmative ending in colloquialism - meaning totally.

 

[Monky_O]

thank you

what is the Kansai Dialect, and how much different is it from the standard?

 

[saladesu]

Kansai-ben. You've probably heard tons of characters speak it, maybe just without realizing it. First one that comes to mind for me is Ichimaru Gin from Bleach, hopefully you've watched the anime then you'd have heard him speak and you'd hear the difference ^^

An example of Kansai-ben would be as mikkih provided, where the "nai" becomes "hen"
Mieru -> Mienai -> Miehen
Taberu -> Tabenai -> Tabehen

There are nouns too that are specific to Kansai-ben, an example would be "akan" which could probably be translated to "dame" or "shimatta" (oh no/this isn't good). Or "ookini" which is the same as "arigatou" (thank you).

Basically Kansai-ben differs quite greatly from standard Japanese. It's often hard for even native speakers of standard Japanese to understand Kansai-ben, so if you're learning Japanese you should probably ignore it for now and come back to it when you're more proficient Besides, Kansai-ben is actually a group of dialects including Osaka-ben, Kyoto-ben and many more, with differences between them so yeah, save yourself the trouble and don't confuse yourself unnecessarily 8)

Check out wiki for more details if you're interested.

 

[Monky_O]

yeah, i'm going to ignore Kansai-ben for now

thanks for your thorough explanation