Basically, I’m asking, what percentage of Japanese phrases and vocabulary translates directly to English? I remember studying German and the ratio was fairly high. Of course, there were some words or phrases (Mostly phrases) that didn’t make sense in direct translation or described a concept that didn’t have an English direct equivalent. Even studying Spanish and Italian, I found the 1:1 ratio was fairly high.
Yes I googled it. No data or even a ball park answer was found.
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Almost none. Unless the Japanese is using many borrowed words. Japanese grammar and word order us different from English. Plus it has different kinds of words, like adjectivals.
None.
English is a Germanic language, so yes, the ratio is high.
Same with Spanish and Italian, they are both Romance languages.
I don’t know, but as I was talking about adjectives with a friend…
– (It) is not famous.
– Yuumei de wa nai.
Where
– Yuumei = famous
– De = being
– Wa = “as for”
– Nai = is non existent
So the Japanese text is saying: as for (it) being famous, (that) is non existent.
extremely low. it’s one major challenge in learning the language – even when you find a similar word in one scenario, they’re not cognates, they do not match in other scenarios, other phrases, other patterns.
Words that are written in Katakana are usually loanwords. Some come close such as カメラ/ka-me-ra being camera. And less close you have words like トイレ/to-i-re that means toilet/restroom. But these words come from all over the world so some of them don’t make sense in English. Such as パン/pa-n meaning bread is from Spanish/Portuguese. Which from my understanding there is a lot of cross over due to Spain and Portugal’s history as naval/trading empires. The nearby Philippines were a Spanish colony until WW2.
As for how much is actually English. Then it’s not an awful lot. Most of the vocab I’m learning is new to me with the occasional noun that bears a little resemblance.
Do you mean 1-to-1 in sentences?
English is a SVO (subject-verb-object) language, while Japanese is mostly (but not strictly) SOV. So, right off the bat you can see that words in a sentence won’t line up 1-to-1.
Japanese has words that perform functions that word endings or a word’s position in a sentence perform in English, so those words won’t match 1-to-1 to any English word. Conversely, Japanese doesn’t have articles (“the”, “a”, “an”) and most words don’t have a plural form.
In Japanese, some words are not necessary but they are in English. If we know who it being discussed, and I want to say “I see a cat”, the “I” is optional in Japanese, but is necessary in English.
Example: “I see a cat” is “Watashi wa neko o mimamsu” [私はネコをみます。 Note that “neko” can be written 猫 or ねこ or ネコ. ]
* **Watashi** is “I” but is optional if it’s clear who sees the cat.
* **wa** is a particle that indicates that the word/phrase before it (watashi) is the topic of the sentence, but doesn’t translate to any one English word
* **neko** = cat or cats
* **o** is a particle that indicates that the word/phrase before it (neko) is an object of a verb. There is no English word that has the same meaning.
* **mimasu** = see or sees.
So the Japanese sentence, translated word for word into English would be I [untranslatable] a cat/some cats [untranslatable] see. If it’s clear who sees the cat, the “watashi wa” is optional. “Neko o mimasu” is grammatically correct (English sentences require a subject), but could also mean “He/she/you/they/we see the cat/a cat/(some )cats.”
Tldr: no.
I’m a native German speaker. There’re a lot of Greek and Latin loanwords that are the same in English and German. Those words tend to be taken from Chinese in Japanese.
Also the grammar works very differently as well, because Japanese has particles and the verb is at the end of the sentence.
Almost none.
Consider this.
There are two words, 牛乳 gyunyu and ミルク miruku.
When you check a Japanese-English dictionary, you may see milk as a possible example, candidate of English translation of both of the two words.
The Economy Principle in Language holds.
If there are two words whose values are the same, one of the two ceases to exist.
Both of the two have been surviving. So the values of the two words are different.
***The signification of a word is the ensemble of its usages.***
You can say コンデンスミルク kondensu-miruku, but you cannnot say コンデンス牛乳 kondensu gyunyu.
The same goes for エバミルク eba-miruku, スキムミルク sukimu-miruku, ローファット‐ミルク ro-fatto-miruku.
Or you can say コーヒー牛乳 kohi-gyunyu, but you cannot say コーヒーミルク kohi-miruku.
ミルクコーヒー miruku-kohi refers to a different beverage from コーヒー牛乳 kohi-gyunyu. In a coffee shop what you may ask a waiter to give you is ミルク miruku, not 牛乳 gyunyu.
Thus the significations of ミルク miruku and 牛乳 gyu-nyu are different.
Therefore there is no one to one relation between an English word “milk” and a Japanese word ミルク miruku.
Or in Japanese, プラスチック purasuchikku plus レジン rejin is 樹脂 jyushi if you check their usages. Thus レジン rejin is not “resin”.
Or in Japanese, デバイス debaisu means active components, as oppose to passive components, and, as such, they are not “devices” in English.