When counting people do we ever use り?

The counter 人 can be read as にん or り. I always thought that り was only for ひとり and ふたり but when Google translates

実際、社会人1000人が考える「今、学ぶべき教養」ランキングを見ると、

It produces:

issai, shakai hito 1000-ri ga kangaeru `ima, manabubeki kyōyō’ rankingu o miru to,

Is this just a case of Google translate being buggy or do people use り in this context?

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The romaji equivalent of 実際 is missing the “j”

Edit: also appears google messed up the romaji for
社会人 shakai jin

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So in short, don’t trust Google Translate. :upside_down_face:

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It’s just a case of Google Translate being Google Translate. Machine translations are mostly garbage even if sometimes you can get something reasonable out of them. It’s not a bug, it’s just a limitation of all such tools no matter how much Google claims its tool is powered by “AI”.

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Thank y’all. I do not trust Google translate but I do find it useful sometimes. My impression is that in the last year it got much better than what it used to be.

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Lol. I wouldn’t say that. Just use it with caution. It’s a powerful tool. I always confirm things by using SYSTRAN Translate and Jisho.

Sean is correct. Don’t trust it. I run sentences through it just to check now and again for fun and the results are still overwhelmingly garbage.

Google Translate is not really a problem for me :man_shrugging: It’s a tool as good as any other. You just have to know how to use it. I used to think it was pure garbage, until I started learning Japanese and realised what an effective tool it can be.

I can’t really think of a reason I’d ever use it.

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The only thing I use it for is the camera functionality for kanji recognition. Though honestly, that can’t handle rarer / more complex kanji at all which is a shame since that’s my primary use case.

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An idea, hear me out. Google Translate powered by…Leebo?

I’ll see myself out now.

I’ve even seen google translate return the complete opposite meaning from the original text… And I feel like, if you know enough Japanese to catch all of the errors it is making, then why would you need it in the first place? Google translate only seems useful for languages that you know absolutely nothing about, and just want to get some vague sense of what the text says, since other options are unavailable to you. To be fair, it seems to work better on languages that are more similar to English, like German for example, but even then I wouldn’t trust it.

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It is way faster to copy and paste larger portions of text than checking it on a dictionary. I often use it when there is some Wankikani sentence with some unknown kanji or some kani that I’m not sure about the reading. Often Google’s translations matches the Wanikani translation. Later, I use Jisho on some individual words/terms I’m interested and it agrees with Google in most cases.

In GT’s defence The Google Translate handwriting recognition tool is way better for kanji than the Jisho equivalent. I like to search using handwriting to test myself on stroke order… and because i’m too lazy to search by radical

Yep, it’s the problem of not knowing what you don’t know.

You see a GT’d sentence and notice a mistake in it. “Wow, how embarrassing!” you say, feeling proud of yourself for knowing enough Japanese to picked up on what was wrong.

Meanwhile there’s another mistake that completely changes the meaning of the sentence, but since you don’t know about it, you just assume it’s fine.

One time I was trying to convince someone that GT was harmful to his learning process, but he wouldn’t be convinced: he believed that it was a reliable tool for verifying his own translation. Eventually I gave up and told him 好きにしな (“do as you like”). Well, it turns out that both this guy and GT thought this sentence meant “I don’t like it”. He came to a (wrong) conclusion about the meaning, validated with GT, and found out that they agreed – so he assumed he was right.

You know you can paste whole sentences into Jisho and it’ll break them down into individual words? It’s not perfect but it’s a hell of a lot better than Google Translate.

I like google translate for when I’m too tired/busy to try to parse the meaning of university-wide emails. It seems to work well enough for more formal Japanese. The image-to-text is also great. And the built-in translate function in chrome has saved me in the past when I wanted to change phone plans and also when I wanted to sign up for a gym membership. It’s not perfect but it gets the job done.

So, great practical tool for getting through daily life but I wouldn’t use it as a learning tool.

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I did not know about that! I love it! Thank you so much! I will use this Jisho feature a lot! But I will also keep using Google translated with all the caveats, :wink:

I would argue it’s even faster to just read the text rather than copy-pasting it anywhere, but if you have copy-paste capability then why not just look up the words you don’t know instead of throwing the whole thing into a translator? If you do that for words you do already know, isn’t it going to hamper your self-confidence and ability to read kanji on your own without help? (Plus GT just gives you a single-word English translation of something, which oftentimes is the wrong meaning in the context of the sentence, or doesn’t tell you the whole picture, etc.) I understand if you don’t know any kanji at all; when I didn’t know any I would use GT sometimes because I basically couldn’t read the sentence whatsoever. But now that I know enough to be able to read most of the sentence, I don’t really see the point in using GT. It doesn’t add anything I couldn’t look up elsewhere with more accurate results, and its translations are often off, stilted, or confusing so it doesn’t help me to confirm that I’m reading it correctly. Sorry maybe I’m just being rude and not seeing others’ POV but the only thing I ever use GT for anymore is the kanji recognition on the mobile app. Moving away from it helped me to feel more independent with my reading, become more confident in my comprehension skills, and took away opportunities to confuse myself with its wonky errors.

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