Completely OT rambling

[cutelittlekitty]

This site has been a big help to me when i come across things that i can't translate: http://www.freetranslation.com/
of course, it only gives direct translations and if a word has two meanings the free translation might get the wrong one, but it's still quite helpful.

Kitty

[Risu-chan]

There are several ways to go about it, but those aren't exactly it. "Warui" is bad more in the sense of "evil" than in the sense of "unskillful"; you'd be insulting their language itself. Similarly, ii/yoi is the opposite of warui (good in an absolute sense, not a talent sense) so saying yoi de wa nai would equate to warui and would again be effectively insulting the nature of the Japanese language... particularly since you're using the informal/abrupt form (nai) rather than arimasen.

What you'd want to say instead is something like:

(Watashi wa) nihongo ga anmari wakarimasen (I don't understand Japanese very well)

(Watashi wa) nihongo ga jouzu de wa arimasen (I'm not very good (skillful) at Japanese)

or

(Watashi wa) nihongo ga heta no desu (I'm bad (unskillful) at Japanese)

I use these phrases all the time myself; people hear me speaking Japanese, assume from my general lack of *blazing* American accent that I'm nearly native-level fluent, and start going 90 miles an hour. So then I have to get them to back up and slow down a little -- I can understand most anime without subtitles, but people speak more slowly and clearly for anything that gets televised than they do in real life! For proof, just record a bunch of your friends talking at lunch, and compare the words-per-minute rate with that of your average news broadcast...

anyway, that's how to say it without saying derogatory things about the language itself... ^^;;;

[xjckimberly]

Oh, Arigatou Yue for the translation and kitty for the site.

Sigh. I've checked and realised my college only offers language course for French and German for Newbies. Which I mean I have to learn Japanese by myself. Hoo-boo. Vocabulory is ok, with a dictionary, but how the hell do I learn grammer by myself??

By the way, what's 'My Japanese is not good' in Japanese??
'Watashi no nohongo wa yoi denai'?

or do you say it as 'my Japanese is bad'?
'Watashi no nihongo wa warui desu'?

[xjckimberly]

Wow. Thank you sooooo much!!
*Glomps and hugs Risu-chan*

So, that's what arimasen means! (Sounds familiar, but I've forgotten where you use it. I remember my sensei once said(read - once. six years ago) that there was something you plug in at end of sentence to denote negativity, but I've forgotten what that was)

Haha. Thank goodness you explained to me or I might have gotten whacked for insulting their language! So much for trying to learn Japanese and piece together sentence out of a English-Japanese dictionary! It didn't explain about connotations and such......

By the way, how do you say
"Sorry, I'm late. I missed the bus."
or
"I forgot the time?"

(This is another of those sentences I USED to know, but have clean forgotten. I remember we were made to apologize and explain if we late for lessons, in Japanese. ) Do I use 'sumimasen' or 'gomen nasei' in this case? I had the impression sumimasen is kinda like 'excuse me'...

[bucket_shot]

Wow~ this is incredible. ^^ So many people speak so many languages! Aside from English (my first language) all I know is some (note: an extremely limited amount of) German that I learned at school for some years. ^^;; They're so similar I'm embarrassed I don't know more.

[Risu-chan]

^^;;;; I know you use a nonstandard verb for missing the bus (it works out more like "the bus went and left without me") but I don't recall offhand which one it was! Similarly, "lost (track of) time" is a little closer than "forgot" would be -- jikan ga nai/I don't have time is for being busy, but I don't recall whether it's jikan ga nakatta or nakushita or nakushite shimatta for getting across the idea of "should have shown up but didn't".

(sweatdrop) I'm a lot better at going from Japanese to English than the other way around; it comes from five years of studying Japanese largely by watching anime with and without subtitles, so the only practice I got was for the specific purpose of going from Japanese to English, and pushing upstream is a little trickier...

Sumimasen vs. gomen nasai: There are a lot of ways to apologize in Japanese. It depends on things like the severity level of what you did, whether or not it's something you feel like you can make up for, the relative social position of the offendee and the offender, and so on. We spent two weeks learning how to apologize, and I just really can't condense it down into a SHORT discussion here... sorry about that!

I'll try to look up the bus and time bits later; I know they're in my textbooks somewhere...

[xjckimberly]

Oooh. I only know bus is "basu"...

And I found Jap lang lessons for beginners at my college!! Goody!!

[rev.tsukiyama]

Heh. Reminds me of trying to figure out where the bus mentioned in the title was in the Bus Gamer manga. Bus being short for business.../obviously/.(What happened to that story anyway? Book one was cool...)