Maybe for an ideal translation, but I think even real-time transliteration would be awesome… and might even start blending grammar patterns across borders.
А странного что такого? Слов порядок тут обычный.
Translation(order preserved): And wierd what’s here? Of words the order here is common.
Если бы я услышал такой порядок слов, я бы подумал, что русский - не твой родной язык. Звучит стремно
Seems so bad now, Yoda’s fucked up language pattern does not.
我从酒店街对面的店里面看到了一套西装我想试 (I think this is gramatically correct?)
I, from hotel, across the street, store, saw, a suit, I want to try.
Lol, reminds me of my mother saying “I today” for 我今天
Like she always say “I today went to the mall”
好久不见-“long time no see” In 汉语, not 日语 lol
I too have the same problem with German. After 3 years of continuous learning have I still not get the problem, when prefix of verbs comes at the end, over with. When the prefix comes at the end of the sentence, have I always the verb forgotten.
Fremdsprache schwierig ist, Yoda says.
The hotel’s neighbor across had a suit I wanted to try on.
You can find less complicated constructions that parallel their order.
Sure, but that sounds clumsier and hides the meaning of the statement at the end which isn’t usually how English speakers talk. It may be a less complicated translation but it isn’t a better one.
Sure. But if you knew how to construct your scentence to make translation that easy you probably wouldn’t need a translator.
By bad dubs of Japanese samurai movies, based on deliberately Yoda’s idiosyncratic speech pattern was.
One of my favorite passages from Mark Twain’s “The Awful German Language”:
There are ten parts of speech, and they are all troublesome. An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech – not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary – six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam – that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each inclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which reinclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it – after which comes the VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb – merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out – the writer shovels in “haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein,” or words to that effect, and the monument is finished. I suppose that this closing hurrah is in the nature of the flourish to a man’s signature – not necessary, but pretty. German books are easy enough to read when you hold them before the looking-glass or stand on your head – so as to reverse the construction – but I think that to learn to read and understand a German newspaper is a thing which must always remain an impossibility to a foreigner.
With all due respect, but he seems to have been talking out of his ass here. Either that, or he’s been reading legal language. Or maybe language was that different in his day.
I’d argue that nowadays, in German, very nested sentences are seen as “good style” in poetic writing only. Plus, the tenses he mentions are an issue specific to English language which has like 23 of them. In German, I’ve heard people with a Master’s degree get by with using one (1) for any situation in everyday life.Mark Twain was a writer in the late 1800s in America who wrote some real novels, but also is mainly known for his humorous and satirical writing. He’s exaggerating here for comedic effect, not trying to be serious. So it’s probably a combination of the older language and the fact that he’s trying to be funny.
To be fair, we have compound words in English. Firefly, sunflower, etc… if you get into latin prefixes and suffixes joined with root words, you can create some incredibly long words.
“Subpostactuallismian.”
Pineapple and hedgehog are some examples which are compound words in English, but not in German.
Pineapple is a rabbit hole. Most people all call it annunuya or something like like that. I’m trying super hard to test myself. Sorry if I’m wrong.
You mean Ananas?
Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft.
The Association for Subordinate Officials of the Head Office Management of the Danube Steamboat Electrical Services.
German is on another level when it comes to compound words.
We can’t forget antidisestablishmentarianism
prime sesquipedalian word
That use of punctuation is both beautiful and horrifying.
“Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz fachsimpeln haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein.” 🥰
Having been a relay operator for a few years, this is true even in English. You might be able to guess what someone is saying (and the floor managers always encouraged trying to) but you’ll never have 100% accuracy and it’s far less confusing to the person getting the “translation” if you don’t have to make any corrections by actually waiting for the person to finish their sentence.
What are the last two characters?
While the other answer is correct and more comprehensive, in this phrase the particles are purely used to make the phrase “polite”. Take them out and the phrase is semantically correct and has the exact same meaning, but it can now only be used in an informal settings (between friends, family, …)
Disclaimer: I have only basic knowledge of Japanese, and my Japanese teacher would enthusiastically confirm.
It bothers me that “desu” (the last two characters) aren’t pointing at the period at the end of the sentence.
I lived in Japan for 3 years and took an elementary Japanese college course from an old Japanese lady while I was there. She always described “desu” as an audible period mark. Formally declaring the end of a sentence. Simply adding it to the end of a word can turn it into a full and complete sentence.
As other comments mentioned, removing it makes the sentence less formal, which is fine with friends and family. There are several ways to speak Japanese depending on who you’re talking to. Whether it’s a friend, a lover, your boss, a stranger… there are several variations of politeness/formality to the language, which makes it very difficult to learn how to speak properly.
“Desu” is pronounced “dess” (don’t say the “U”) in traditional dialects. Or if you’re from Southern Japan, their “southern drawl” includes pronouncing every single character, so you’d pronounce it “de-soo.”
I don’t speak a lick of Japanese but I found this online:
です is used to mark words as polite if they cannot conjugate to show politeness themselves… です is one of the most fundamental words in the Japanese language. It’s super useful — it can be attached to just one other word to form some basic sentences. It’s also quite safe to use since it’s part of the polite form, so you’re unlikely to offend someone with this word… です can be tacked onto the end of a noun, な-adjective, or い-adjective to form a polite, positive, present tense sentence (say that ten times fast 😉). In other words, it allows us to talk about something that is true, and relevant to the present moment and/or the future—all in a polite way of course.
So it’s bitte for Japanese?
Ja
Desu sort of means “it is”, but it is a sentence ending formality.
It’s the Japanese copula
a copula is a word or phrase that links the subject of a sentence to a subject complement, such as the word is in the sentence “The sky is blue” or the phrase was not being in the sentence “It was not being cooperative.”
That’s a tricky one. I guess it sort of means “it is that” if you take it super literally? “It is that I want to try on the suit.” But in practice, it just adds a level of politeness and formality to the sentence.
You will hear a lot of masu (ます) and desu (です) tossed in there all over the place when people are trying to be courteous.
How the fuck did I learn Mandarin but this confusing the fuck out of me.
Mandarin has the same subject-verb-object as English, generally
I’m now convinced the Pacific makes you speak backwards.
Is it odd that I want a whole website of these charts where I can compare the way many many different languages translate the same sentence and see the lines between the meaning components in them?
Then you and I are both odd because that sounds fascinating.
If you find one, please share with the rest of the class. That would be cool to see.
If i were to real time translate, it would be something like: I went to a shop across the hotel, I saw a suit there, and I wanted to try it on.
More like:
My hotel’s vicinity, within it there is a store where I saw a suit that I want to try on.
It doesn’t say anything about going to the store and it is in the current tense of wanting to try on something that you past-tense saw within the subordinate clause.
Japanese particles.
Particles are used together with words to mark their grammatical role in the sentence.
私(は) - I (subject)
ホテル(の)向かい(に) - hotel (possessive) across the street (to)
(お)店(で) - (just makes the sentence more formal) shop (in)
スーツ(を) - suit (object)Fun thing about particles is that word order is a lot more flexible compared to English. As long as the right particles are attached to the right words, you can sometimes* swap around the order of these words and still be grammatically correct.
This Japanese interpreter did a TEDx talk about her work. She mentions a few issues with going between Japanese and English, like how subjects in Japanese are often dropped from sentences, so she once made the assumption to give a CEO a male pronoun only to find out that the CEO was female when she walked in the room shortly after.
The interpreter also says that you can’t wait to have all the information about a sentence to start translating, so she likens it to “watching a thriller” because you don’t know whether the verb at the end is “going to negate the whole sentence”.
That last part is really funny for me currently learning Japanese. The differnece between desu and janaidesu is always at the end, but makes (in my head) a “it’s like that” into a “it’s not like that” thus negating the whole sentence. A constant lookout for a “NOT” at the end of each sentence.
What if you take the speculative execution strategy and have multiple interpreters translating every possible semantic branch and then throwing out the recordings of the interpretations that were incorrect? 🙃
Can’t wait for the Spectre/Meltdown exploit.
Why would you do that?
You have to wait for the last work in the sentence anyway so doing extra calculations to throw out later isn’t making it faster.
“That’s so cool… NOT.”
But an entire language like that.
That’s literally how negation works in Japanese lol
I know it comes off weird to me because I’m a Westerner, but I wonder what cultural and cognitive benefits can be directly linked to having your language innately require the listener to actually wait, listen, and then respond.
Or maybe I’m assuming it works that way, but when you actually live in that culture and language, you are more likely to predict what is gonna be said so the same kind of foot in mouth moments can happen.
That occurred to me too - I am old and can recall how we used to communicate and we were much more likely to give people time and hear them out than now. I am British and we now typically speak faster than we used to, youngest generation gobbles so fast I find what they say incomprehensible except for the expletives, and our accents have changed - standardised around Americanised, Londonised, British generic. There used to be strong regional accents, even separate dialects that had survived for centuries, but now these have effectively gone extinct and if I use a dialect word no one under fifty knows what it means. I find that rather sad. As for writing, this too is abbreviated and simplified e.g. using emojis instead of trying to describe complex emotions. I see this as a top-down change driven by technology and monetisation of social lives - it promotes brief attention spans, rapid turn-over of thought/feeling, quickly onto next topic, see another ad, move on, repeat, no leisure to reflect or second-guess or share a process with others. I find it debases public culture, encourages divisions and intolerance, and promotes political extremism (mainly of the Right since the Far-Right approves instinctive action over rational choices - ‘move fast, break stuff’ as does predatory capitalism - ‘don’t think, just buy!’). Everything is ‘hot takes’, empty slogans, and algorithm-led scripted reactivity.
I am not surprised that there is a global loss of literacy and language comprehension skills - in China, reliance on mobile technology means using predictive speech-to-text (Chinese language cannot be written effectively with keyboards) or voice control with the result that even university-educated Chinese now struggle to read or write less common words e.g. ‘brassicas’ rather than ‘cabbages’. Take away phones and/or censor the use of this technology e.g. ban some vocabulary so it cannot be communicated in writing, spoken to others via technology, or be used to control technology, and Chinese citizens will soon be unable to communicate or think independently.
To avoid dystopian futures, I think we will have to take responsibility to reclaim these skills and/or resist the change by being ‘old fashioned’ especially when using new technology like AI or when online. Like I am now - writing a lot instead of a few hot words and expecting others to donate time and bother to read me. This kind of communication is either reactionary or revolutionary now, radical Right or radical Left. This kind of English is the luddite sabotage of the C21st. I want to use this kind of slow language to promote Leftist politics. Bring back the verbose! Bring back slow time! Save humanity! I guess I am in a minority on this but I always have been all my life so I shrug and continue. In practical terms, I ration my exposure to fast language and spend a lot of time reading paper books or listening to archive audio from C20th where the language is slower and at a pace that supports meaningful conversation (even if it is just imagined dialogue between the reader or listener and the author or speakers). Thank you for reading this far (if you did).
The word order doesn’t really make you wait longer or listen more carefully-- you’re just getting the information in different places. Like if you looked at a sentence without the last word, in English you have “Give the ball to X” and in Japanese you have “Ball to John X”. In English you’re waiting to see who receives the ball and in Japanese you’re waiting to hear what to do with it.
The more confusing aspect of Japanese is that it’s a high context language, meaning that once things like subjects and objects are understood between speakers, those things get dropped from sentences. A sort of analogous thing in English would be use of pronouns-- once both speakers understand who or what is being talked about, we stop using the name for the person or object and use s/he or it. In Japanese, those pronouns would get dropped entirely.
Because of that, Japanese can be really frustrating for a language learner because you’re already maybe missing some parts of sentences, and so if you miss the one crucial thing that’s being talked about, moving forward you don’t even have a pronoun clue to give you a hint.
I tried learning Japanese and struggled for exactly the reasons you describe so clearly. I felt I might manage to learn if I were living in Japan and picking up the contextual clues but I could not learn Japanese effectively from a textbook. Visiting Japan is high on my wish list, maybe one day.
American anime fans know you can get by with saying the English word plus “ZUUUUUUU!”
