I recently reached level 11, and since the card I received from WaniKani said I would understand every kanji written there by the time I finished level 10, I thought it would be cool to try translating it!
I would really appreciate if you guys could check my translation for errors and better interpretations of all those intimidating characters!
“Congratulations for finally finishing Level 2, ok?
Now, I feel the Kanji you still don’t understand are not few
It might be that you can’t read much text
It may take time, despite what you remember
However, please keep studying every day using WaniKani
Not giving up is something very important”
I know I could rephrase most of it to sound better in english, but I guess it’s better to leave it that way for peer analysis!
I’m probably not the best person to give feedback for Japanese translations since my own Japanese knowledge is still lacking, but let’s give it a try:
I’m not sure where the double negative comes from in your translation “Now, I feel the Kanji you still don’t understand are not few” - I would have translated it as “For now, the Kanji that are understandable to you might still be few”.
The のに in 思い出すのに時間がかかるかもしれない is not the single particle のに meaning “despite”, but the nominalizing の and the particle に. So 思い出すの means “the remembering”. So I would translate it as “The recalling might still take time”.
Congratulations to reaching level 11!
EDIT: I just read in “A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar” that the のに meaning “despite” really is the combination of the nominalizing の and the particle に. So I guess that feedback was already a mistake by me - at least I tried ^^
I guess my double negative was a mistake indeed, maybe because I still need to translate part by part then glue them all together. It may come from まだ (not yet) and かもしれない, which is an expression but it’s conjugated as a negative. An error nonetheless!
There’s no “I feel” in this sentence. A literal translation would be
“As of now, the number of kanji you understand is few maybe”
Note that they have skipped all the 、in this text, which might make parsing difficult (it’s grammatically correct, but foreign learners are usually thrown off by it; you could have one between おめでとう and the ついに for instance)
I got a card from Kanae too! I’m curious what the backside of your card looked like, mine had a message written by hand partly in english and partly in japanese. It’s one of my favorite things in my room, I hung it up by my desk as motivation!
