The quick or short Language Questions Thread (not grammar)

I don’t think it is a British English thing either, not in my dialect at least.

— Dave

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Yeah, this is the first time I’ve heard of it, as a 45-year old Southern British English speaker. My guess is it’s a bit of foodie/chef jargon.

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I’ve heard stuff like “this is eating well” but then I think the “this” is referring to the act of eating the thing, not the thing itself

I don’t think it makes any sense if it’s referring directly to the food (even if you were to say something like “this cake is eating well”)

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Question,
I met the expression 走馬灯を見る which apparently means “to have a flashback” but I don’t understand why the word for running lantern 走馬灯 is associated with flashback?

Does it? I’m not familiar with the idiom, only the literal revolving-lantern meaning, but my searching suggests it’s the kind of “various images flash in front of your eyes” thing that’s part of the cliche near-death experience in English. That fits with the image of a revolving lantern, where different figures appear, move across and disappear as it turns:

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I knew what this lantern is but didn’t link it to the “experiences flashing” as you said. I was perplexed as well but in the manga I’m reading this term appears where the only possible explanation is flashback (or, less english, simply images of the past). Also google told me “flashback”

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Just encountered this sentence in 鬼滅の刃:

死の直前に人が走馬灯を見る理由は(…)

And background the panel is literally showing flashbacks

That is exactly the “your life flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die” meaning I was talking about. I don’t think in English we’d call that a flashback, which (ignoring the film/narrative technique meaning) is a sudden re-experiencing of a single past experience, not a sequence of them.

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Are you saying that it’s totally different from flashbacks or that in english you wouldn’t call it a flashback but there is enough concept overlap to be used as that?

I’m saying that (a) at least to me, as an English speaker, “life-flashes-before-your-eyes-before-death” and “you have a flashback (e.g to when you were in a car accident)” are distinct things and I wouldn’t use “have a flashback” for the former, and (b) I believe that the Japanese idioms involving 走馬灯 are about the former, not the latter. Oh, and (c) that the usage in your manga also appears to me to be the former, not the latter.

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The only reason I got to the word flashback is the proposed google translation, and also because it’s in my non native english speaker’s imaginary, but if you say that it’s probably not right, or simply that it can be better described with other words, I’m all for it :handshake: not that it makes a gigantic difference anyways, I suppose

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Yeah, I think the important thing here is understanding that the 走馬灯 is a metaphor for a sequence of images or memories, not a single vivid one.

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You’re probably safest running on the assumption that Google Translate is incorrect unless corroborated by other sources, rather than that it’s correct unless contradicted by other sources.

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I already do, in fact I mever use google translate - DeepL at best and I still see mistakes.
In this case, I simply didn’t realize that the “flashback” translation was a mere translation with the google translator integrated in the search bar (I noticed it now that you mention it). I suppose that a simple wordとは search would be okay most of the times?

If you want to look up a single word I would always prefer Jisho, e.g. 走馬灯 - Jisho.org - would have saved you the whole discussion :wink:
(or use weblio and the like if you prefer monolingual).

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:exploding_head: no way… I keep giving for granted that my incredibly well made jisho app will have the same meaning of the website for some reason… in fact I checked the word on the app and only got the lantern meaning…
for what concerns monolingual websites to check definitions, from mobile phone weblio is difficult for me to use. Every definition has so many links that I can’t even touch anywhere to copy (and past on DeepL to help with the translation) without opening one. The layout is also quite packed. I find myself a bit better with kotobank but I’m open to suggestions if anyone knows anything with better layout

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That sense was added to the database in mid-2022, so your app’s copy is nearly a year out of date. (Different websites and apps refresh their copies at different rates, or sometimes not at all. For a phone app it might be a manual process for the app developer of getting the latest db and building a new version of the app to upload to the app store, in which case it isn’t going to happen very often.)

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From experience and the fact apps often favor UX, that would probably be the case.

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I keep noticing that Jisho (or rather the underlying *DICT) frequently update definitions, so I can highly recommend using the live variant whenever possible @mariodesu . FWIW I have the jisho.org website open in my phone‘s browser all the time and it’s equally convenient to using an app (if mobile data is available ofc).

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I disagree, but mainly because apps are more integrated with the os (can look stuff up directly by highlighting it) and because takoboto is way better at parsing multiple words

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