Does anybody know of a resource that’s like Tofugu’s 4500 sentences, but for English to Japanese?
I enjoy practicing from material I didn’t create, since it usually means more variety and unexpected contents/structures. Plus, I really like having small, manageable chunks to work on.
If nothing useful exists, should we start collecting sentences here?
For now, I would recommend glossika.com It seems to be paid, though.
Thanks for sharing! Not quite what I’m looking for, but it’s great to have something new to reference.
Also, why would you recommend glossika? What have you found to be most useful?
I just tried one session of Japanese with glossika and most translations were kinda approximative. One sentence had the voice and the text differ. (The voice said 処方せん but the text read 処方薬).
I don’t know about quality in other languages, but this is not very trust-inspiring.
That’s cause no one knows the insanity of this kanji, 箋
Anyway, I’m confused, the Tofugu sentences don’t have English translations. So do you just want 4500 English sentences?
Yes, exactly. I know it might sound a little weird. Of course, you could just translate whatever material you come across, but what I’m looking for is a curated list that would present opportunities/challenges to apply correct grammatical constructions, vocabulary, kanji, etc.
Anyway, it probably doesn’t exist, but I think it’s useful to go in both directions. JA>EN is for comprehension, but EN>JA would challenge your ability to express some idea or meaning in a natural way.
Well, I don’t think the stuff in the 4500 sentences are curated that specifically. Really your best bet is simply take something like ALC, The Corpus of Contemporary Balanced Japanese or something else like that, and then just only look at the English side.
Also I think it’s much better to have some kind of “answer” or one possible answer to look at because otherwise you run the risk of writing 4500 wrong sentences and not having a single idea that any of it was wrong. That’s how you get something like Tanaka which is full of garbage sentences.
What I’d really suggest is conversations. That’s how you really learn how to express yourself and if it doesn’t make sense or you didn’t get your thought through, the conversation comes to a grinding halt.
As syphus just said as I was typing this, its best to have some kind of answer.
If you are purely looking for english sentences without any already existing japanese translation, just try translating passages from a short story or something. Afterwards, send it to someone on hello talk or something and ask if the story/part of a story made sense.
Make sure the native you are talking to is comfortable correcting you, though. Some japanese are too damn nice/non-confrontational to correct you and will just nod lol. That will achieve the opposite effect.
Yes that too. That happens in both ways as well, if they don’t understand your English, they’ll just nod.
But… no one could read 薬 as 「せん」 so I really don’t understand why the voice made that mistake. Also, how comes no one corrected that already? And how many such mistakes remain in the 99.9% of sentences I haven’t seen?
Not that I really care about knowing the answers to those questions.
Yea I don’t know either. My main guess without seeing or knowing anything about the site is someone just deleted the wrong part of 処方箋医薬品 when writing it.
Yeah, I go to a meetup every Monday, lessons with my tutor on Wednesdays, and I chat with my friends on Line and what not. But still, just curious if there was a resource folks knew about. Seems like there’s not, but I’ll check out ALC. Thank you.
Yeah, if it’s dialogue-heavy that might be good. The problem with translating literature is that you often need to re-write it quite a bit for it to make sense and convey the meaning. Reading English translations of short stories or novels after reading the original Japanese I often think, “whoa, this sentence is completely different.” But yeah, I should probably just start grabbing some content here and there and working on it. Thank you for the suggestions.
If you ignore the Audio, it would actually be EN->JP sentence flashcards.
I use Glossika to help chase the Audio Cheetah, that is, improving my sentence and vocab parser.
Speaking of which, reading a light novel is also another kind of Cheetah, the eye-gaze-speed Cheetah. I need to improve on that as well.
A good EN->JP, focusing on Japanese learning might be hard to find a good source. As I always use プログレッシブ和英中辞典 for JE, my guess is a Japanese people-used EJ dictionary ランダムハウス英和大辞典 might be a good source.
Another one worth mentioning for sentences, focusing on Grammar, would be JLPT Grammar from Jtest4you, if you can work out Anki, of course.
You could get a parallel-text book and work backwards? Translate the EN text into JA, and then verify against their version.
I have found more than one bad translations too. One to share would be
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