Seems so bad now, Yoda’s fucked up language pattern does not.
А странного что такого? Слов порядок тут обычный.
Translation(order preserved): And wierd what’s here? Of words the order here is common.
我从酒店街对面的店里面看到了一套西装我想试 (I think this is gramatically correct?)
I, from hotel, across the street, store, saw, a suit, I want to try.
Lol, reminds me of my mother saying “I today” for 我今天
Like she always say “I today went to the mall”
I too have the same problem with German. After 3 years of continuous learning have I still not get the problem, when prefix of verbs comes at the end, over with. When the prefix comes at the end of the sentence, have I always the verb forgotten.
Fremdsprache schwierig ist, Yoda says.
The hotel’s neighbor across had a suit I wanted to try on.
You can find less complicated constructions that parallel their order.
Sure. But if you knew how to construct your scentence to make translation that easy you probably wouldn’t need a translator.
Haha, you could also read this as someone speaking in a way where he constantly interrupts himself–like a really excited little kid.
“I–the hotel is across the street from this store, and in there, I saw this suit I want to try on!”
Japanese is a really fun language, I thoroughly enjoyed the classes I took before my depression swallowed me up for a bit. Absolutely reccomend, it’s only about half as scary as it looks–the syllabary is not difficult to remember, and Japanese is a decently structured, ordered language. The main challenge is expanding your vocabulary, and keeping track of Kanji.
I taught myself Mandarin and found it quite do-able, especially reading it whereas speaking it is harder. Then I tried learning Japanese and gave up. I think you need to know more about Japanese culture and the unspoken meanings to really get the hang of it and use it correctly/politely. All I now can remember of Japanese is ‘maramoto’ (? spelling) which means ‘cute little thing’ and is Japanese for ‘guinea pig’ and ‘chrissimassy cakeo’ which, you’ll never guess, is Japanese for ‘Christmas cake’! I try to imagine myself visiting Japan and trying out my language skills - walking into a hotel and talking to reception by improvising with my only vocabulary - ‘Maramoto, (greeting with a polite bow). Chrissymassy cakeo? (pronounced with accompanying hand gestures so as to convey ‘do you have a room with view of the sea and en suite?’)’ I imagine being politely but firmly shown the door! Ha!
Having been a relay operator for a few years, this is true even in English. You might be able to guess what someone is saying (and the floor managers always encouraged trying to) but you’ll never have 100% accuracy and it’s far less confusing to the person getting the “translation” if you don’t have to make any corrections by actually waiting for the person to finish their sentence.
Trying to parse that in that backwards order makes my brain hurt.
This Japanese interpreter did a TEDx talk about her work. She mentions a few issues with going between Japanese and English, like how subjects in Japanese are often dropped from sentences, so she once made the assumption to give a CEO a male pronoun only to find out that the CEO was female when she walked in the room shortly after.
The interpreter also says that you can’t wait to have all the information about a sentence to start translating, so she likens it to “watching a thriller” because you don’t know whether the verb at the end is “going to negate the whole sentence”.
That last part is really funny for me currently learning Japanese. The differnece between desu and janaidesu is always at the end, but makes (in my head) a “it’s like that” into a “it’s not like that” thus negating the whole sentence. A constant lookout for a “NOT” at the end of each sentence.
“That’s so cool… NOT.”
But an entire language like that.
That’s literally how negation works in Japanese lol
I know it comes off weird to me because I’m a Westerner, but I wonder what cultural and cognitive benefits can be directly linked to having your language innately require the listener to actually wait, listen, and then respond.
Or maybe I’m assuming it works that way, but when you actually live in that culture and language, you are more likely to predict what is gonna be said so the same kind of foot in mouth moments can happen.
That occurred to me too - I am old and can recall how we used to communicate and we were much more likely to give people time and hear them out than now. I am British and we now typically speak faster than we used to, youngest generation gobbles so fast I find what they say incomprehensible except for the expletives, and our accents have changed - standardised around Americanised, Londonised, British generic. There used to be strong regional accents, even separate dialects that had survived for centuries, but now these have effectively gone extinct and if I use a dialect word no one under fifty knows what it means. I find that rather sad. As for writing, this too is abbreviated and simplified e.g. using emojis instead of trying to describe complex emotions. I see this as a top-down change driven by technology and monetisation of social lives - it promotes brief attention spans, rapid turn-over of thought/feeling, quickly onto next topic, see another ad, move on, repeat, no leisure to reflect or second-guess or share a process with others. I find it debases public culture, encourages divisions and intolerance, and promotes political extremism (mainly of the Right since the Far-Right approves instinctive action over rational choices - ‘move fast, break stuff’ as does predatory capitalism - ‘don’t think, just buy!’). Everything is ‘hot takes’, empty slogans, and algorithm-led scripted reactivity.
I am not surprised that there is a global loss of literacy and language comprehension skills - in China, reliance on mobile technology means using predictive speech-to-text (Chinese language cannot be written effectively with keyboards) or voice control with the result that even university-educated Chinese now struggle to read or write less common words e.g. ‘brassicas’ rather than ‘cabbages’. Take away phones and/or censor the use of this technology e.g. ban some vocabulary so it cannot be communicated in writing, spoken to others via technology, or be used to control technology, and Chinese citizens will soon be unable to communicate or think independently.
To avoid dystopian futures, I think we will have to take responsibility to reclaim these skills and/or resist the change by being ‘old fashioned’ especially when using new technology like AI or when online. Like I am now - writing a lot instead of a few hot words and expecting others to donate time and bother to read me. This kind of communication is either reactionary or revolutionary now, radical Right or radical Left. This kind of English is the luddite sabotage of the C21st. I want to use this kind of slow language to promote Leftist politics. Bring back the verbose! Bring back slow time! Save humanity! I guess I am in a minority on this but I always have been all my life so I shrug and continue. In practical terms, I ration my exposure to fast language and spend a lot of time reading paper books or listening to archive audio from C20th where the language is slower and at a pace that supports meaningful conversation (even if it is just imagined dialogue between the reader or listener and the author or speakers). Thank you for reading this far (if you did).
The word order doesn’t really make you wait longer or listen more carefully-- you’re just getting the information in different places. Like if you looked at a sentence without the last word, in English you have “Give the ball to X” and in Japanese you have “Ball to John X”. In English you’re waiting to see who receives the ball and in Japanese you’re waiting to hear what to do with it.
The more confusing aspect of Japanese is that it’s a high context language, meaning that once things like subjects and objects are understood between speakers, those things get dropped from sentences. A sort of analogous thing in English would be use of pronouns-- once both speakers understand who or what is being talked about, we stop using the name for the person or object and use s/he or it. In Japanese, those pronouns would get dropped entirely.
Because of that, Japanese can be really frustrating for a language learner because you’re already maybe missing some parts of sentences, and so if you miss the one crucial thing that’s being talked about, moving forward you don’t even have a pronoun clue to give you a hint.
I tried learning Japanese and struggled for exactly the reasons you describe so clearly. I felt I might manage to learn if I were living in Japan and picking up the contextual clues but I could not learn Japanese effectively from a textbook. Visiting Japan is high on my wish list, maybe one day.
What if you take the speculative execution strategy and have multiple interpreters translating every possible semantic branch and then throwing out the recordings of the interpretations that were incorrect? 🙃
AI does this with MLM. I rest my case.
Can’t wait for the Spectre/Meltdown exploit.
Why would you do that?
You have to wait for the last work in the sentence anyway so doing extra calculations to throw out later isn’t making it faster.
American anime fans know you can get by with saying the English word plus “ZUUUUUUU!”
One of my favorite passages from Mark Twain’s “The Awful German Language”:
There are ten parts of speech, and they are all troublesome. An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech – not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary – six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam – that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each inclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which reinclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it – after which comes the VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb – merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out – the writer shovels in “haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein,” or words to that effect, and the monument is finished. I suppose that this closing hurrah is in the nature of the flourish to a man’s signature – not necessary, but pretty. German books are easy enough to read when you hold them before the looking-glass or stand on your head – so as to reverse the construction – but I think that to learn to read and understand a German newspaper is a thing which must always remain an impossibility to a foreigner.
With all due respect, but he seems to have been talking out of his ass here. Either that, or he’s been reading legal language. Or maybe language was that different in his day.
I’d argue that nowadays, in German, very nested sentences are seen as “good style” in poetic writing only. Plus, the tenses he mentions are an issue specific to English language which has like 23 of them. In German, I’ve heard people with a Master’s degree get by with using one (1) for any situation in everyday life.Mark Twain was a writer in the late 1800s in America who wrote some real novels, but also is mainly known for his humorous and satirical writing. He’s exaggerating here for comedic effect, not trying to be serious. So it’s probably a combination of the older language and the fact that he’s trying to be funny.
That use of punctuation is both beautiful and horrifying.
To be fair, we have compound words in English. Firefly, sunflower, etc… if you get into latin prefixes and suffixes joined with root words, you can create some incredibly long words.
“Subpostactuallismian.”
Pineapple and hedgehog are some examples which are compound words in English, but not in German.
Pineapple is a rabbit hole. Most people all call it annunuya or something like like that. I’m trying super hard to test myself. Sorry if I’m wrong.
You mean Ananas?
Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft.
The Association for Subordinate Officials of the Head Office Management of the Danube Steamboat Electrical Services.
German is on another level when it comes to compound words.
We can’t forget antidisestablishmentarianism
prime sesquipedalian word
“Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz fachsimpeln haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein.” 🥰
Lol try slavic languages and hungarian where the word order is extremely flexible. Ive always had a hard time translating between hungarian and english even tho im basically native in both of them. For example “A kutya kergeti a macskat”, “A macskat kergeti a kutya”, “Kergeti a macskat a kutya”, “Kergeti a kutya a macskat”, “A macskat a kutya kergeti” and “A kutya a macskat kergeti” are all valid and mean the same thing but the emphasis is on a different part of the sentence. Kinda insane from the perspective of english where “The dog is chasing the cat” and “The cat is being chased by the dog” are the only valid orders and even that is cheating as i would translate the second one a bit different into hungarian because once again the focus changes. Also there are a lot of things in common speach that i dont know how a translator would translate. In hungarian for example we have a ridiculous amount of curse words and combinations that are simply lost when translating. “A ménkű csapjon bele a jó dagadt gecis faszszopó román kurva anyádba” is something(or idk it was similar to this) i have actually heard from a real person in a real conversation. I wont translate it becauase its extremely vulgar but you get the point. The other thing is, returning to japanese for example, there are a few things that can be represented in one language but not in another one like honorifics for example. Last thing is when translating without context pronouns probably get completly lost. How would an ai looking only at the text know who the “you” was aimed at. Especially when translating to languages where even you has different forms depending on gender for example. All things thatll have to be solved i guess.
I’ve often wanted a direct literal translation in the subtitles.
Like, I want my subtitles to read
I hotel from the street across that’s a shop I saw a suit on try want to.
Because then at least I can learn to understand “Watashi” is self-reference, and match up the phonetics with the words.
I love this idea!
The translation isn’t as direct as the lines in the image imply though. “Watashi wa” becoming “I” hides that “wa” is a grammatical marker for the topic, kind of, of the sentence. More complete it’s like, “I, as the topic of this sentence”. You end up with a direct in place translation of “I, as the topic, a hotel’s across the street, as a location, a shop, as a setting, exists, saw a suit, to which, wearing as a desire, is true”Transliteration of individual characters is a surprising good way to understand/learn Chinese. A colleague of mine once read the whole Tao Te Ching this way.
Is it odd that I want a whole website of these charts where I can compare the way many many different languages translate the same sentence and see the lines between the meaning components in them?
Then you and I are both odd because that sounds fascinating.
If you find one, please share with the rest of the class. That would be cool to see.
If i were to real time translate, it would be something like: I went to a shop across the hotel, I saw a suit there, and I wanted to try it on.
More like:
My hotel’s vicinity, within it there is a store where I saw a suit that I want to try on.
It doesn’t say anything about going to the store and it is in the current tense of wanting to try on something that you past-tense saw within the subordinate clause.
Ah the joy of learning Japanese as an English speaker. Oh you learned all the hiragana? Bro there’s katakana and kanji. Oh you don’t know the kanji!? BRO. Have fun learning how to look those bad boys up using radicals!
Don’t forget about all the Chinese words thrown in for good measure!
