Hey everyone,
I started using HelloTalk to communicate with Japanese people and it’s fun, but sometimes I have a hard time understanding everything.
I wrote for example, that I probably sometimes communicate in way that may seem too straightforward. And a nice lady answered me:
そう思っているならおまじない。
The app offered me something like “If you think so, I feel sorry“ as a translation, but when I searched for the meaning of おまじない I only found “good luck charm“. And the lady told me it means “magic”. I’m a bit confused know, so I’m thankful for any help!
Thanks, that’s the definition I found. But i doesn’t really help me to understand the meaning of the sentence or why the translation „I feel sorry“ was chosen.
Hmm… it sounded like you hadn’t found the one about saying it when doing magic (Definition #2)
What was the source of the translation? It’s obviously just wrong, so I wouldn’t put much thought into it.
If I were to put it into something more like what we would say in English, it’d be like “If that’s what you think, then just cross your fingers (for good luck) when you are speaking.”
The English translation exactly marches what you get using Google Translate, so maybe it just did a machine translation because there was no proper translation available?
I explained the situation to my girlfriend as it was explained in the original post, and she said she would have no idea what the person was trying to say.
We know natives aren’t infallible, so she could always just not be understanding it. But maybe I took too far of a leap in my reading of it? Or there’s some part missing?
The kanji were not the problem and I understood this imagining part. I just couldn’t make out the connection between this part and the おまじない. Sorry for posting the sentence in isolation, I did not assume that it would be such a mysterious expression.