Hi guys!
I’m a real beginner in here so excuse me if i make any errors
I wanted to try out the goldlist method to speed up my speaking knowledge and I was wondering what I should use to translate the phrase I want to learn.
Let’s say I want to learn how to say, “I am a stressed university student” in Japanese, what should I use to ensure that I get a fairly accurate translation?
Again I am barely 3-4 months into learning, and as of now im just sticking to basic vocabulary and grammar
DeepL is pretty good, but I wouldn’t rely too much on any translation tool
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In the above thread, people were just discussing whether they think DeepL does well with Japanese.
However, the consensus with machine translation is that
this doesn’t really exist yet.
It can of course help, and people you’re communicating with are pretty likely to know what you’re saying nowadays. And for a language beginner, the other understanding what you mean is the only bar to clear, basically. But assume it can carry the wrong nuance, the wrong politeness level, or sometimes be utter gibberish.
Use it without trusting it. 
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Not so much translation per se, but if you want to get a feel for how something might be phrased in Japanese, try looking it up on weblio! It basically has a whole bunch of Japanese sentences from various sources with English translations, and you can search for words and phrases in Japanese or English to see how they tend to be used.
Quality of the sentences and translations may vary? So take it with a grain of salt, but I find it really helpful especially with things like nuance of synonyms to see patterns across a whole bunch of sentences. It’s probably not going to give you a one-to-one translation of something like “I am a stressed university student” since that’s fairly specific and also likely simple in structure, but it could be worth checking out depending on what you’re trying to say!
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I’m having a lot of success with DeepL for the project I’m working on. That said, I have a dictionary, am a native English speaker, and use DeepL mainly for clarification if I’m struggling to understand how things are supposed to go together. It’s given me strange or incorrect context translations, but I’d like to think I’m advanced enough to recognise that XD
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I think especially if you intend to thoroughly drill these sentences, I would avoid machine translation and use example sentences sourced from native or study material if at all possible.
It’s impossible for a machine taking one sentence of input from you to intuit the correct context and register that you had in mind. If you’re drilling and memorizing these sentences, that’s a lot of potential for something unexpected to slip in without realizing it and wasting a lot of study time.
I think if you have a really specific English phrase in mind to study, translating it yourself would even be better, since at least then any mistakes would be your own mistakes. But otherwise asking a human, preferably a native speaker or teacher (or non-native forum-goers in a pinch 
) would always be a better way to go than even Deepl in this case. Pretty much any study material will also have accompanying example sentences with grammar explanations, etc., and being able to feel like you’re fully confident in a sentence (since it came from a textbook that explained it thoroughly, say), can go a really long way, even if they aren’t handcrafted for your situation.
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