How dare you say you’ve dealt with walking down the thorny path in life just to keep up with their level of hardship. https://www.wanikani.com/vocabulary/茨
How does one come to this translation? Where in the sentence is it indicated that a distinction between the person saying the metaphor and other peoples hardships is made?
I asked chat.gpt and he told me, it is a wrong translation. He gave me:
“With this level of difficulty, it’s easy to say that life is like walking on a thorny path, isn’t it?”
The pause introduced by the comma (assuming this is a spoken sentence where you can’t visibly hear quotation marks) would be enough to separate the quote from the sentence before.
GPT is making a lot of mistakes, such as ignoring the role だ plays following 人生 and not understanding how よね changes the tone of the sentence. The よね changes the meaning to something more like “So you can so easily say…” and the 人生だ is a strong indication that they’re talking about their own life and not everyone’s life.
I would not trust GPT with anything. If you don’t already know the answer it’s impossible to know when GPT is wrong. It’s a language simulator, not a knowledgebase. GPT is good at predicting what a human might say but the human it’s imitating isn’t necessarily an expert.
“just to keep up with their level of hardship” seems an odd way to translate この程度の苦難で, though. I would have assumed “at this level of hardship” (i.e. the sense of the whole thing is “how dare you claim your life is so hard when you have it pretty easy and this is a pretty minor problem”).
Yes, this. ChatGPT doesn’t understand this nuance of よく言える and takes it literally.
But the WaniKani translation doesn’t really seem correct either and should probably be updated.
Whoever translated the sentence thought that だけ meant that eating natto alone (i.e. by itself) when it was really meant as natto is the only Japanese food they couldn’t eat.