Google Translate. The lazy person’s way to language. Full of errors, especially with non-Western languages. A waste of time for the serious student. Well, anyway, that’s what I used to believe. Now, I don’t believe it so strongly. (All the following is based on what I do in Android. I’m sure something similar can be done in iOS.) Here’s what I currently do when I get a sentence from a Japanese person on HelloTalk that I can’t figure out. First of all, I copy and paste it into Jota+, because sometimes a really tiny Kanji that gets a bit bigger in my text editor suddenly becomes comprehensible. If that didn’t… Read More
Continue ReadingThis Word is Rare
So I’ve already written about how I’m using the Android app Aedict as my main Japanese dictionary. It’s really handy, acts as a simple translator, but, it has one feature I can’t understand. It (like every Japanese-English dictionary I’ve seen) uses Jim Breen’s dictionary data as the source of all the words. And, it gives a “rarity” for each word I have looked up on it. I questioned some of the rarities before, but today I really had to check what was going on. I was typing out a reply on HelloTalk to someone, and I wanted to check that I was spelling こちらこそ correctly (no doubled vowel sounds anywhere),… Read More
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