Learning through Translating: ブラックジャックによろしく episode 4: 夏雲

These are the ones I use on a daily basis, Goo is the most comprehensive of the two. Another well-known one is Sanseido (which you’ve mentioned as well) but that one rarely does what I want it to do and Weblio gives me a headache. None of them support entire sentence input though so because I am a lazy being I still use Jisho a lot; it’s usually quite accurate, just bad at nuances (利子 vs 利息, 推薦 vs 推奨 etc).

The ads on weblio are doing my head in. I quickly end up agitated/irritated if I refer to it often. I hope there’s a paid version which is ad-free.

47. & 48.

自分が病気になったとしてたら…

先生みたいな人に手術してもらいたいと思いました…

I thought I wanted to be operated by someone like you, if I get ill myself...

病気(びょうき)になる : to fall ill
としてたら = としていたら; とする after a plain verb means something as “in case that” tells my dictionary. Then with ている, and that one with ~たら form (sort of conditional, “if”, “when”)
なったとしてたら instead of just なってたら seems a bit redundant; for added politeness ?

Also, になった is in the past; is ti because the thing he taught is no longer valid ( 思いました in next sentence ); and so if he gets ill now/in the future it doesn’t apply anymore ?

先生 みたいな 人 に 手術 して もらいたい と 思いました…
sensei like->person [from] operation to.do+TE receive+want [quote] to.think+masu+past

先生みたいな人 = a person like the professor (I hadn’t realized that みたい is a na-adjective!)
~てもらう = to get someone do something; to “receive” the action.

In each of the word pairs you’ve listed, there’s one word which exists in Chinese and another that doesn’t (or which I’m not aware of). More things for me to learn then. But yes, that’s the thing about kanji compounds that sometimes makes searching in monolingual dictionaries necessary: change one character, and you get a whole different nuance, even if the translation is the same.

Returning to dictionaries though, I agree that Weblio’s interface may not be the most pleasant for reading. (It uses the smallest font.) I personally find Goo’s more cluttered, but the information is useful if you’re interested in it. Also, yes, Goo seems to have a large number of words, along with EN-JP dictionaries and a thesaurus (among other things).

The monolingual Weblio has much smaller ads, so you may find that more usable. I have no clue if one can pay for an ad-free experience, though it seems possible.

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That’s 47 and 48, @YanagiPablo

49.

先生『は』あの手術『の』時何『を』考えていたんですか…?


先生 is the topic of the sentence as indicated by 『は』;
あの手術の時: that time of the surgery;
考えていた: “to think” in the past progressive;
んですか=のですか
:speech_balloon:Doctor, what were you thinking at the time of the surgery?


50.

どうせ死ぬ『と』思ってたんなら…


So I knew we had something about どうせ:

Hm… How else do I explain this… another way of translating ~なら is ‘if ~’ i.e. ‘if ~ is true’. Also, どうせ comes from どう and せよ, which is the written imperative of する, and is often used for hypothetical things, like いずれにせよ (roughly ‘whichever (one) choses’, from the structure ‘~にする’, which means ‘to choose/decide on ~’). Therefore, どうせ literally translates to ‘however (one) does i.e. acts’. That might help you understand, along with parsing the sentence as I said: [どうせ死ぬ]→なら. That is, translate どうせ死ぬ first, then add the meaning of なら.

:speech_balloon:You thought In the case that he would die no matter what
☆ Is that it? Still unclear about どうせ.

Very close! ~なら applies to the word before it; “if you thought that he would die no matter what…”

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52.

私『は』外科医だ

:speech_balloon: I’m a surgeon

自分『の』仕事『に』プライド『を』持っている

:speech_balloon:I am proud of my job


:thought_balloon:Any particular reason why 意気地 isn’t use for pride? Why the gairaigo here?

53.

あのおじいさん『を』助けたかったからやじゃないんですか?

Analysis incoming…
あのおじいさん: that old man…
『を』direct object of 助けたかった: want to help in the past;
から: from;
じゃない: negative;

意気地 is closer to willpower/confidence that you’ll succeed. 自負心 is the closest native word I can think of, but プライド is used more often. Kind of like how メニュー is more common than 献立.

So it’s a colloquial thing. I wonder why they’d rather use an English variant that the native word of their own language. The French do the same and use a lot of English word. It puzzles me.

This is something I feel I should know but I’m drawing a blank here. Is 助けたかった the past of 〜たい form?

My native language is pretty much 50% English at this point, people just think it sounds cool I think haha. Something unique to Japan’s use of English loanwords though is 和製英語 (“Japan-made English”), my favourite is バイキング (viking) for “buffet”.

Yep!

Come on now, you can’t tease your native language without saying what it is. German and English are closely related but I don’t think that’s what you mean.

Off-topic again:
I’m a bit of a purist when it comes to languages and while I understand the necessity of loan words, I don’t like them used when a native word already exists. I juste read a good article about that:

Strawberry as a fruit is ichigo in Japanese, but when talking about the flavor of ice cream or gum, the loanword sutoroberī is more common.

Why? It’s sad to favour English words over native ones. :disappointed_relieved:

From the same article:

Japanese currently consists of around 33% words of Japanese origin ( wago ), 49% words of Chinese origin ( kango ) and 18% loanwords from other languages (including words of mixed origin and the made-in-Japan pseudo-English known as wasei eigo ).[edited for brievety] I do not deny that new terms can supplement and enrich, but I am concerned that their overuse could drown out perfectly good Japanese expressions.

I guess プライド would be more of a “wasei eigo” then.

More interesting tidbit:

This suggests that roughly one in five words in Japanese are loanwords, whose rising share is bringing about fundamental changes in the language.

I think it’s important to differentiate words of foreign origins which fill a niche and loanwords which replace native words.

Source: Are Loanwords a Threat to the Japanese Language? | Nippon.com

Re: 53.

What is から for in this context? I don’t understand. Doesn’t から mean “from”?

Weblio

In order to encourage people to explore new dictionaries other than Jisho, I thought I’d write a little about Weblio which can be daunting at first glance (well it was for me).

This is from the app but I would imagine the website is similar in design.

So under those four main tabs there’s a crass advertisement which gives me nausea. It’s peddling for something so cheap and I’ll designed, I gag whenever I see it. I mean, I really do, this isn’t a metaphor.

① 意味【いみ】meaning;

② 例文【れいぶん】example sentences;

③ 類語【るいご】synonym;

④ 共起表現【きょうきひょいげん】cooccurrence expression;

☆ so what the flip does “cooccurrence” even mean?

In linguistics, co-occurrence or cooccurrence is an above-chance frequency of occurrence of two terms (also known as coincidence or concurrence) from a text corpus alongside each other in a certain order.
-Wikipedia

It’s right inbetween German and English, both linguistically and geographically :wink:

One in five is more than I’d have guessed, interesting. Suppose it makes sense though, Japanese being a language isolate makes loanwords stand out more (compared to European languages which have exchanged so many words that the entire concept of a loanword has become a bit unclear for most) and not having a long shared history means that when a new concept reaches Japan, it’s easier to just copy the word than make up a new one.

It’s “because” here. Just noticed you typed an extra や in your transcription by the way, it’s ~からじゃないんですか

The advertisement on Weblio

image
Oh wow! What a fun game!! What would I do if I were stuck in an elevator and a dog came in?!

I live in a damn village, we don’t have elevators you dingus. And if I were confronted by a dog, I wouldn’t carry a flipping raw steak in my pocket to fling in case I was attacked by a dog or a tennis ball for that matter.

I’d push one of your advertisers towards the dog and hope he gets shred to pieces, one less vulture to worry about. How’s that for an answer?

Wasted money: expression; spending a dollar on those types of brain dead games.

You’re so secretive, ayamadori. I’ll find out which country it is, I’m on the case!

@ayamedori:
Got it, Netherlands! Progressive city northwest of Europe between England and Germany. Also Deutsch shares both from English and German.

Re: から

Ah ok so it’s because after a verb or adjective.

So it’s:
:speech_balloon:It’s because you didn’t want to help that old man

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Bingo! Greetings from Amsterdam :tulip:

The じゃないんですか!?makes it a question: “isn’t it because you wanted to help that old man?”

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Ah ha! Everything falls into place now. You already have an advantage to learn Japanese then as a lot of words were borrowed from Dutch. Case solved. Shannon is from Chicago, I already solved that one. I think Jonapedia is in France somewhere.

This very scientific website says it’s one the cities with the most beautiful women:

Amsterdam (Netherlands)
Women in Netherlands are exceptionally tall, blonde, and beautiful. Many of them are fun and laid-back, often riding past on bicycles with a friendly smile for passers-by. Amsterdam is a hip cultural hub with flocks of these stunning ladies, so it’s the best place in the country to visit.

There are plenty of world-class Dutch beauties such as Doutzen Kroes, Famke Janssen, and Lara Stone. Cindy Kimberly is from Amsterdam.


51.

なんであんなていねいな手術『を』したんですか


なんで: why;
あんな: such;
ていねい〔な〕〜な adj. civil, courteous, conscientious;
手術: surgery;
『を』direct object for した, “to do” in the past;
:speech_balloon: “Why do such a conscientious surgery?”

@YanagiPablo:
Do you remember, you made a post compiling all of the previous days we worked on the manga. I wanted to check how many days it took us for each episode but can’t find it anywhere. Can you tell from the top of your head?

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I do, not to mention the phonetics being quite similar and the fact that every Japanese person seems to have a friend who visited Europe and raved about our windmills… Instant conversation practice. (Also, this is a thing.)
No clue who half those women are but I’ll take that as a compliment :tipping_hand_woman:t2: