Im learning japanese on duolingo and i wanna see if some phrases im coming up with are correct. I wont type in Katagana / kanji / hiragana, but ill write them from what I learned in Duolingo and try to translate it. Can anyone tell me if what i say is correct? When i tried translating from english to japanese in google translate, it showed something different for 1 phrase, so ill try to say one slightly long thing
Konnichiwa! Daniel desu to Yasashi gakusei desu.
Translation from my part: Hello! I’m Daniel and I’m a nice student!
Ok that wasnt long but is it correct?
4 comments
No.
Ur getting ahead of urself. Learn more of the language before trying to translate.
Japanese isn’t just English with all the words replaced.
PLEASE don’t use Duolingo as your primary learning tool. I guess it’s okay if you’re for example Italian and want to learn French or Spanish, which are similar languages and you can mostly just translate word by word; but Japanese is fundamentally so different from English that you need to learn the fundamentals from the ground up, and Duolingo just doesn’t do that (from what I’ve been told, at least).
I would recommend you to type in both kana and kanji as romanji makes Japanese tougher to read. Take for example, the word hashi. It has actually multiple meanings depending on the context, pronunciation and even the kanji! [橋](#fg “はし”) here means bridge, while [箸](#fg “はし”) here means chopsticks, and they both have the same pronunciation, if you haven’t noticed it yet.
And Japanese isn’t the same as English as its grammar’s structure is extremely different from English itself. For example, take this English sentence, “Somebody broke the vase!” The Japanese would probably say it as “The vase broke!” The Japanese sentence structure is more like SOV compared to English’s SVO. Not to mention that Japanese has [敬語](#fg “けいご”), (honorifics), particles, and even no articles and many, many verb and adjective conjugations!
So you wouldn’t want a one-on-one translation, word-by-word, if you’re trying to learn Japanese.
you call yourself a nice student? 🤔