I get curious, and sometimes when I’m feeling a bit lazy with immersion I’ll grab the very english book I’m reading, Ctrl + c then Ctrl + V into some translator and use a decent sounding tts to read it to me as I follow along. I find it kind of helpful with learning new vocab and getting exposed to as much jp as possible, but honestly now I’m having doubts if it’s building up bad or awkward language. I know they’re not fully accurate, but is it ok to use this kind of method for a small portion of immersion, or is it better to avoid them in their entirety?
Sorry if this is kind of a dumb question, but I’ve been contemplating it more recently and honestly even outside of this scenario I’m curious on this communities options of eng → jp translators!
oh, cool idea! personally i have never done this before as a form of practice or immersion. i think the issue is that literary japanese is much different from spoken japanese - same goes for english and therefore many things get ‘lost in translation’ in the same way that both languages have weird sayings that aren’t translatable directly between them. also in my experience the longer the passage the more clunky the translation tends to be haha but i am curious what others have to say about their experiences as well!
The method is good. People underestimate how effective corrective feedback in your native language is. You try to puzzle out a sentence, check your interpretation vs a translation, and then go back and figure out things you got wrong. Extremely, extremely effective for making big leaps in reading comprehension.
Machine translation is probably not the way to go about it, though.
I think after some some you just get a feel of “ohh it uses this but it’s cringe”
Like even if I speak my granny a lot, I do not use her expressions because my brain just seas that it is just not used in circles where I exist. Even if I grown up with her, I still quite easily switch register to the one I need in a required situation, and use constructions people use there.
The worst thing, for example ai, can give you, is probably that uses a bunch of elivated terms that no one really uses, but it’s very noticeable there was some precious’s contact with the language.
Ye, maybe something like this