Great advice! Thank you! I have skimmed the text in chapter 1 many times, but I see that I have to study it more thoroughly. I’ll be back with a couple of questions later today!
I just had my first “I can read this because of WaniKani” experience: Page 4, line 6, the word 全体。The word itself is not in WK ( I checked), but just before starting this lesson I unlocked the character 全. That’s already a win!
Excellent advice in that post by @Kawazoe. I already read the 地理 text during weekend, but will read it a couple of times again and ensure that I really understand every single sentence also with the grammar, and can read it aloud with a good speed.
I really struggle with one sentence, the one that starts with 400 on page 5, line 19. It’s long, two whole lines, and I just don’t think I understand it. I don’t want to quote too much of the Japanese text here, but I’m sure you can find it in the book.
Looking at each piece of the sentence, I get:
The white walls have remained for more than 400 years
The shape of the building looks like a white egret relaxing and stretching its wings
Because of this, the castle is called white egret castle (Shirasagi Jou).
Putting it together, I get: The white walls have been there for more than 400 years, and because the shape of the building looks like a white egret relaxing and stretching its wings, the castle is called White Egret Castle.
Thank you! Yes, I think a strict translation is the way to go here. Thanks for checking it for me and for confirming that I had understood most of it, and for giving me the correct translation!
Any reason why this could be a problem? I’m writing a lot of things down on Japanese.io and I was thinking of sharing them but would that be considered wrong cause we are sharing the book or something?
I was thinking the same. I’d actually like to translate the dialogue portion as practice here. I saw some bookclubs actually doing translation of some sections of the book per line.
Yes, that’s what I was thinking. This part of the forum is open to search engines. I don’t think it’s OK to write the text from the book here. Posting your translation should be fine though.
I don’t think short extracts like this would be illegal or bad practice – we’re not exactly making the whole book or chapter content available for free, it probably falls under fair-use laws in most countries…
Also, posting the sentence along with an attempted understanding makes it easier for anyone to jump in and correct us!