Never give up, never surrender!!
JLPT is coming soon and, while I don’t expect to pass, I DO expect to beat my previous scores!!
Never give up, never surrender!!
JLPT is coming soon and, while I don’t expect to pass, I DO expect to beat my previous scores!!
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I can’t decide yet whether the finish line is way too close or still way too far
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it’s so close! no need to rush, but you got this if you want it!
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びっくりレベルアップしちゃった
久々コウイチのメールをいただくことが楽しみしている
あ、苦を通じて死になっちゃった
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Me just having fun with your post 
:
Oooh! I think I could read most of that! (Kinda pleasantly surprised!) Got hung up on the last sentence, though. Here’s my attempt to translate before I look up anything:
びっくりレベルアップしちゃった
“I was surprised to suddenly (without intending to) Level Up!”
久々コウイチのメールをいただくことが楽しみしている
“Receiving (humbly) an email from Koichi after a long time is fun/enjoyable!”
あ、苦を通じて死になっちゃった
“Ah, <something about ‘suffering’> and <something like ‘I suddenly died’???>” 
After quickly looking things up (with 10ten Japanese Reader only):
- 久々 (‘(it’s been) a long while’) is pronounced ひさびさ! Didn’t know that part! I’m more familiar with 久しい and 久しぶり. Learn something new every day!
- いただく is humble Japanese (謙譲語) confirmed!
- 苦 on its own does indeed mean ‘suffering’, among many other possible nuances (maybe ‘anxiety’?), and is pronounced simply く (wasn’t quite sure of that, though now that I saw that, it makes sense, based on the kanji reading itself).
- 通じて has many possible meanings. I think the WaniKani vocab version means ‘to pass’ or ‘to pass through’?
- At first I read 死に as 死 (word) + に (particle), i.e. ‘to/in/at death’, but now I’m reminded that it could be the single word 死に (しに), the ‘masu’ stem of the verb 死ぬ, ‘to die’. Thus it might be a single compound verb: 死になっちゃった
= 死に + なっちゃった
= 死に + なる (> chau form > past tense)
=? to ‘become’ ‘dead’? Unintentionally? In the past?
=? “I suddenly died”? - Still not sure how to interpret last sentence …
After checking with …
Google Translate:
I was surprised at how much I leveled up. I’m looking forward to receiving Koichi’s email after such a long time.
Ah, I died through suffering.
My thoughts:
- Oops, I forgot that 楽しみ can mean not just ‘enjoyment’, but also ‘anticipation’, and that 楽しみしている probably means “I’m looking forward to”. Makes more sense!
- But, @potatonaught (or anyone else, too!), I seem to recall “Looking forward to” being taught in various sources as 楽しみにする (> している) rather than 楽しみする (> している). Was this intentional? Or perhaps a (very minor!) mistake.
- Oh! Seeing 苦 and 死 translated as “died through suffering” reminded me that WaniKani has names/titles for each set of ten levels, and … yup! Levels 11-20 are indeed called 苦 (‘Painful’), and 21-30 are indeed called 死 (‘Death’)! Ah! Makes so much more sense!
DeepL:
I’m so surprised I’ve raised my level.
I am looking forward to receiving Koichi’s mail after a long time!
Oh, I’m dying a bitter death!
Ah ha! I think I got it now! Especially after testing out the translations below. The last sentence probably means “Ah! I made it through ‘Painful’, now I’m at ‘Death’.”
Anyone know the right way to mark words like that (being used as ‘titles’ or whatever) in Japanese text? Would it be the 「」 quotation marks? Like:
あ、「苦」を通じて「死」になっちゃった
Or is it the other quotes I’ve seen around, 『』, or even【】?
Translations of different forms of Xになる。
| Japanese | Ending | Google Translate | DeepL |
|---|---|---|---|
| レベル２１になる。 | Plain | Reach level 21. | Level 21. |
| レベル２１になった。 | Past | I reached level 21. | Level 21. |
| レベル２１になって。 | て-form | Reach level 21. | Level 21. |
| レベル２１になってする。 | Plain | I’ll reach level 21. | I do it at level 21. |
| レベル２１になってした。 | Past | I was at level 21. | I was at level 21. |
| レベル２１になってして。 | て-form | I’ve reached level 21. | Level 21. |
| レベル２１になってしまう。 | Plain | It will be level 21. | I become level 21. |
| レベル２１になってしまった。 | Past | I’ve reached level 21. | I’m on level 21. |
| レベル２１になってしまって。 | て-form | I’m at level 21 now. | I’m on level 21. |
| レベル２１になっちゃう。 | Plain | I’ll be at level 21. | I’ll be on level 21. |
| レベル２１になっちゃった。 | Past | I’m at level 21. | I’m on level 21. |
| レベル２１になっちゃって。 | て-form | I’m at level 21 now. | I’m on level 21. |
Notes:
- I’ve tried the following forms of Xになる:
- なる, for the ‘base’ case,
- なってする, more for comparison’s sake than for understanding the original sentence,
- なってしまう for the grammatically ‘proper’ version, and
- なっちゃう for the ‘casual’ version used in the original sentence.
- I also have the ‘plain’ or ‘dictionary’ versions of each form, as well as the ‘past’ versions, and the て-form (aka the ‘conjunctive’) versions (for the sake of my own curiosity, mostly).
- Only showing the first suggested translation for each sentence.
- Sometimes there are alternative translations also suggested. Not showing those, for sake of brevity.
- Showing translations for the exact Japanese, in isolation, without additional context, whereas such context is often very important in real life. Sometimes/often, the automatic translations vary depending on the additional, surrounding text (i.e. the literal con-text of the sentence-in-question, where the prefix ‘con-’ means ‘with’).
- For example,
I tried just listing all these sentences in a row, with each sentence on its own line of text, and with a full-stop (「。」) at the end of each. I was hoping that by ‘terminating’ each sentence, and having them on their own lines, that the translation tools would thus translate each sentence in ‘isolation’. …- But Google Translate just spit out “Becoming level 21.” for every single line, as if they all meant exactly the same thing.
- Meanwhile DeepL did more what I was expecting, giving quite distinct translations for each sentence.
- In contrast,
After thinking “GT can’t possibly think these all mean the same thing!” I tried testing out each individual sentence separately (with no surrounding ‘con-text’) …- And GT did indeed give out very different, distinct results for each sentence.
- But, perhaps surprisingly (or perhaps not, if you think about it a little bit ), DeepL gave less distinct translations for each sentence in isolation.
- So, in the end, I decided to list only the translations of each sentence in isolation (without any additional con-text), and that is what’s listed below. The GT ones thus are more varied than my first attempt, while the DeepL ones are actually a bit less varied.
- As mentioned previously, often there are alternative translations suggested, and often, in the case of DeepL in particular, those alternatives hint at a more specific nuance.
- So, if you want to ‘catch’ the full nuance of such sentences (to the extent that machine translations can expose the ‘full’ nuance in the first place), I would suggest playing around with the sentences you’re trying to understand, within each translation tool, and also using more than one translation tool.
- For example,
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Hopefully someone else can explain properly but particle と is used as a quotation marker.
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you got it
pobody’s nerfect ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
yeah you can do that. yeah i probably should’ve done that
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Has been a while! Took me a bit longer for this level up! But I’m alsmost there! 
Just one level to go!
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So… I guess I did it Honestly, it didn’t feel as triumphant as I thought it would. I still can’t quite wrap my head around WK being over soon tbh 
Here’s my lv up chart.
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Very well done!
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おめでとう！！
Great job and well done!
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Yes. I stopped learning Japanese and I continued learning Arabic.
But I’m back…
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