The cnet128 Thread

[cnet128]

Well, I can't really say as I'm sure what you mean. The classifying of ichidan and godan verbs...? That suggests to me telling the difference between them, or something, but I don't really see how that would be much of an issue.

If you're just talking about learning how to conjugate verbs into different forms in general, then... well, obviously you have to learn how to conjugate them, or, well, you won't be able to conjugate them Learning each of the different forms one by one in a logical order, practising using them in sentences as you go along, is the usual method...

At any rate, if you are trying to teach the language to yourself, I'd say the least you should realistically do is get yourself a decent textbook. Many people will tell you - and I can certainly see where they're coming from - that even a textbook is never enough, and you can't really learn Japanese without actually taking proper lessons.

 

[kyubisharingan]

its just...so much T_T
http://nihongoresources.com/language/lessons/lesson-01/lesson.html

 

[cnet128]

Da-yum, what an evil site. I mean, on the one hand, it's a brilliant site, because it actually seems to cover everything from the basics, giving long and interesting explanations of how things work, and not leaving anything out to simplify.

But on the other hand, it tries to throw all the grammatical information at you at once, without any real context to put it in, which makes it an absolute nightmare if you're actually trying to learn anything. Particularly the way it throws all the verb stems at you like that - yes, it's interesting to look at the verb stems as a whole entity like that if you're just kind of doing so out of interest, thinking about them in abstract linguistic terms and seeing how everything pieces together. No, it's not even slightly helpful if you're actually trying to learn to conjugate the verbs.

You do have to end up learning all the verb stems if you're trying to learn Japanese, but learning them all by rote like that would drive anybody insane. The general, more natural way to learn the stems is "as and when you need them". That is, you learn how to conjugate the verb into actual grammatical forms, slowly but surely, one at a time, practicing using each one in sentences and generally getting used to actually using them. And then once you've learned a fair few verb forms, you start to find that the forms you're conjugate in exactly the same way as ones you've already learned, only with different endings (they use the same stems) - so you can relate them back to the forms you know and they become easy to learn. Basically, what you're doing is learning the stems as a natural part of learning the forms that you're actually going to use. And learning forms that you're actually going to use is much easier than memorising abstract tables.

 

[TodaPower]

Hey man, I appreciate you taking time to translate these raws for us.

Here's a question.... what do the letters in this pic say?
I am debating on a tatto with this ... so I would like to know what it means.
Thanks in advance..and do you ever read Initial D?

 

[cnet128]

Gaaaaaaahhhh...

DON'T STRETCH MY THREAD! *glares*

Anyway, those don't look much like Japanese characters to me, more like stylised English letters or something... heavily stylised...

 

[TodaPower]

Ok I removed it, I didn't think it would come out so big...my bad.

I guess if you don't recognize them... they aren't japanese.

 

[alex_melkor]

thanks, I really had that doubt from a long time considering that naruto´s manga is going right now about chapter 376, so I´m really thankful. I found this trade today,because the day I wrote that question I was a little drunk, and can´t found it at the next day; but I like to tank you anyways

I´m sorry for my english, last time and this time too.

a question: Is very hard to learn Japanese? how many years took you to know it well enoght to start translation?

 

[cnet128]

thanks, I really had that doubt from a long time considering that naruto´s manga is going right now about chapter 376, so I´m really thankful. I found this trade today,because the day I wrote that question I was a little drunk, and can´t found it at the next day; but I like to tank you anyways

I´m sorry for my english, last time and this time too.

a question: Is very hard to learn Japanese? how many years took you to know it well enoght to start translation?

I wouldn't say it's exactly "hard" to learn Japanese. But then again, I just happen to have something of a talent for learning languages, so maybe I'm biased. Personally, I just find it incredibly interesting. At any rate, I suppose you'd say I really started learning Japanese about two years ago. That's when I started taking an evening class.

But that doesn't really give you a good idea of the learning process I went through. For one thing, although that's when I started taking classes, I'd been taking an interest in the language for quite a while before then, reading up on it on the internet and such. So I was pretty familiar with the grammar before I ever started taking those classes. And then there's the fact that although I took those evening classes for a year, I'd say they weren't really that important to my learning of the language. It was about *one* year ago that I started studying it at university, and the rate of study is just so different that the year of evening classes seems almost entirely meaningless in comparison.

...Of course, I kind of went through most of that in, like, the second post I made in this thread. But hey.

 

[adachi2]

Hi cnet128, you are great, i´m spanish, and i read your translations, are cool ^^

Have you project thought for the future? ummm juushin enbu (hero tales) for example? hahahaha, is a jocket, but it is great ^^

how do you choose the series that you are going to translate? For that you like it, for that they are famous, does someone ask for them you?

i could like read juushin enbu, your translations ^^


sorry for my english xD

 

[cnet128]

No problem, your English is... entertaining XD

But like I said in the PM, I'm just not taking on any new translation projects at the moment. I don't want to work myself to death or anything.

As for how I choose the series to translate, well, essentially I just translate the series I read.

 

[Ichimaru Gin n Tonic]

Hey cnet
Just dropping by here to thank you for all those awesome translations

What sparked your interest when you first translate your first manga (chapter/tank)?
Oh, one more thing. Two actually, well three actually.
- Do you like football?
- If you do, what's your favorite team? If you don't what sport do you like?

 

[cnet128]

What sparked my interest? Well, I don't really know how to answer that... I mean, I just started translating things that I was already reading. All that really inspired me to translate them was a combination of wanting to understand them from the RAWs (rather than second-hand through Edited Mangas), and just plain wanting to translate, because translating is fun. And in some cases I wasn't too impressed with the existing translations that were out there for the series and I wanted to try and get something better out there.

As for football, well... I'm really not a sport person at all. But football is clearly better than that silly excuse for a sport that the Americans call football.

 

[BlackDX_knight]

Aren`t you tired of translating so many series? I noticed that you covered quite a range.. How long does it usually takes to translate a normal 17-paged chapter?

I`m new at this translating stuff ( Just started last week )... I can`t help but noticing my translation is quite... Stiff.. Any pointers for this newbie? Do you prefer to keep the originality or to make other understand the storyline?

Last but not least, お疲れさまです。Appreciate your hardwork~ ^_^

 

[cnet128]

Tired? Oh, absolutely not. I have been feeling a little pressured occasionally, but, hey, I'm doing this because I enjoy it

As for how long it takes... well, that varies. A chapter of one of the more complicated series like Sket Dance or Hatsukoi can take many times as long as one of the simpler series like Bleach. And of course there are instances (more common in some manga than others...) where there's a part of the text that just kind of stumps me and I spend ages just trying to figure it out ~_~ At any rate, I couldn't put a time to how long it takes me to translate a chapter... I don't exactly time myself >_<

But if I was going to give a rough estimate, I'd say an hour. Though on top of being rough, that's obviously just an average - Bleach doesn't take anywhere near that long, whereas I'd say the likes of Sket Dance and Hatsukoi take significantly longer.

 

[galeno]

Hi cnet. May I ask if you have any japanese family? I suppose not, but I get this all the time when people know about my "japanese interests".

Even if you studied two years, knowing so much kanji must be hard stuff. Of course, there is always dictionaries, but sometimes I ask myself how can people read such complex symbols in such a tiny character. It should be impossible for someone read chinese subtitles for example. No wonder they have so many illiterates there.

You said you're in college. What course? I'm a journalism student.

And since the height question didn't worked, how much do you weight? It's all right, you can answer in pounds, since I won't understand (I daresay I can use google to find out, though...).

Keep up your good work.

OneLag

 

[cnet128]

No, no Japanese family or anything. My interest in Japanese stems purely from a combination of love of language in general, and interest in the likes of anime, manga and videogames. And of course, once I got into the language, the sheer awesomeness of the language itself was more than enough to keep my interest

And learning kanji isn't really all THAT difficult. I mean, sure, it takes a long time, but you get familiar with the different radicals that make up all the different characters, and you get used to seeing all the more useful kanji in the words you actually run into... and yes, failing that, there's always kanji dictionaries I still rely on looking up most of the kanji I run into in manga, to be honest. Thank god for jisho.org with its incredibly user-friendly kanji lookup interface! (And of course I always have my actual physical kanji dictionaries to turn to as well )

As for my course here at uni, I'm studying Linguistics and Japanese Studies. Like I said, love of language! One of the modules I'm studying at the moment is an introduction to Old English... and what a crazy language THAT is >.<

And no, I don't know my weight either ~_~ And I can't say I have any random weighing scales handy to find out. Sorry! I'm a pretty skinny guy, though ~_~

 

[galeno]

Ou, so you look up kanji on dictionaries... still, how do you look up something that isn't readable? I mean, is there some kind of alphabetic order you can rely on when looking up for the kanji meaning? Kanji seems most-likely a random drawing...

I thought you'd study japanese at your U, cause you said you studied so much more nihongo after entrying. IT would be kind of impossible if you're studying other major...

As questions can't stop, the next ones are: have you travelled throughout Europe? What foreign country you liked the most? Do you intend to go to Japan soon?

 

[cnet128]

Mm, well, there are plenty of ways of looking up kanji. In the traditional method, you look up a kanji based upon its main radical (every kanji is classified under one of the 214 radicals, which do have a specific assigned order), and then based upon how many strokes the rest of the character has. This is the method that most actual Japanese kanji dictionaries use, and it works pretty well. However, it does require you to know the order of the radicals (dictionaries tend to have an index to help you out there), and it also requires you to know which is the main radical in a kanji, which isn't always obvious.

The physical dictionaries I have both use the SKIP method, which is a recent, very systematic and easy-to-use method. Basically, it divides each kanji up logically into two sections, and you just look the kanji up by the number of strokes in each section.

Then there's jisho.org, which puts a very user-friendly interface on the WWWJDIC's "multi-component search" method, which essentially allows you to select all the different parts of the kanji from a list, and shows you all the kanji that contain those components as you click them. It's very quick and easy to find most kanji that way. Plus, failing that, it allows you to search for kanji in a ton of other ways lifted from various physical dictionaries, too. Very convenient.

Whew. Enough about looking up kanji ^^;

No, I haven't travelled throughout Europe. I went to Germany once... that was fun, I guess And as for going to Japan, well, my course is a four-year course, with the third year being a Year Abroad at a Japanese university. So I ought to be going to Japan next year

 

[galeno]

that was the most useful japanese translation post i've ever read. So it's all right, all you have to do is knowing the TWO HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN radicals and divine the one that is being used (since many times it isn`t obvious). I don't know what would foreinger do without sites like this one you described.

Question: Sprecht du any deutsch?

 

[richvh]

Actually, you don't have to know all 214 traditional radicals, unless you're using a dictionary that uses all of them. Plus, a lot of them (especially the high-stroke-count ones) aren't all that common.

Personally, I tend to use the multi-radical lookup in JWPce (if at my computer) or PADict (on my Palm) rather than web based tools. If I'm having a hard time figuring out the right radicals to index too, I'll browse through my Nelson's. (Paper kanji dictionary.)