The value of literal translations (for beginners). And, suggestions for applications that can provide automated interpretations/explanations

Japanese
#1

I tend to overthink everything, which is sometimes a double-edged sword when learning new things. But generally, it’s a plus.

I’m pretty early in my Japanese grammar journey. Bunpro recently gave me this example sentence for the のは・のが verb nominalizer.

読むのは私です。

The interpretation they provide is:

I am the one who reads.

I thought that seemed wrong, from a literal standpoint, since I presumed that the subject of the sentence was “the one who reads”, and the object was “I” (or “me” in English), thus the literal translation should be: “the one who reads is me”. Then I thought, well they are probably just providing a more natural translation. But then I thought… what if this new construct somehow changes my understanding of subject/object placement, and what if that actually is the literal translation, and I’m missing something critical?

This confusion could be avoided by a more thorough explanation (or simply the literal one, which I could easily transform into the more natural one in my head since I know English well). Maybe that’s not practical for Bunpro to do for every example, I don’t know. But the current approach requires me to have a good understanding of Japanese to know that they’re doing the “literal → natural” transformation at times (whereas always giving literal would only require a good understanding of my native language).

This made me think of a related Q I’ve been pondering for some time: is there any web-based engine that does really good literal interpretations and breakdowns of arbitrary sentences? I am a paid subscriber to a number of well known apps, and none of them seem to do this (Renshuu comes sort of close with its “sentence analyzer”, but not quite there).

On a whim, I asked ChatGPT to translate it, and I was very happy with the results (no, this is not a ChatGPT plug). I’m aware of the pitfalls of LLMs (and also that this is a very simple sentence), but so far I haven’t found anything else that can do something like this. Any other ideas?

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#2

I would recommend you to buy the book “A dictionary of basic Japanese grammar”. Bunpro is good but there are other resources with better teaching material, this book is one of them.
For now (since I assume you don’t already have it) click here and type “347” into the page field to be taken to page 337. Read the entry under the title ~no wa ~da.
The first example sentence under the “Notes” for that entry is applicable to the sentence in your post, so 読むのは私です = 読むのは私(*が)です。
Does that (omitted) が particle make the sentence’s meaning clearer to you, since you thought 私 was the object for 読む?

As for the AI for language learning, I would simply avoid using any AI resource altogether. Why would anyone, in regards to teaching, put any amount of trust into something that lacks a brain and is incapable of thinking? Human teachers are far superior, and there’s an abundance of human made resources to learn Japanese.

I don’t think looking for literal translations is as useful as just understanding the actual meaning of what is being said or written. For an easy example let’s use a scenario where I’m teaching a Japanese speaker my language (Swedish).
If the Japanese speaker asked me “Hur är läget?” (What’s up? / How are you?) a natural reply in Swedish would be “Det är lugnt. Ingen fara på taket.”.
If they asked me what that meant in Japanese I wouldn’t give a literal translation because the second sentence ( Ingen fara på taket) would be nonsense in Japanese: 屋根には危険がない。I would just say it means 大丈夫 or 平気だよ, because that’s the actual meaning of what I said in Swedish even though it’s not a literal translation.

PS. I know I linked to a free way to access the book but if you liked that entry please consider buying the physical book to support the authors. They deserve it for writing such a great grammar book.

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#3

https://ichi.moe/ might help you in some way.
But if I were you, I would stick with Bunpro, even if it can be very frustrating when the translation isn’t exactly what you would have expected.A

t some point, you’ll stop looking for literal translations and start thinking more about the nuances in Japanese grammar, especially at the N2 level.

I know that literal translations can help you grasp the correct nuances of many grammar points. If that helps you, you can always add a note at the beginning of each grammar point in your native language, explaining it in detail with examples that suit your style. I generate these using ChatGPT—it can even explain the nuances compared to similar or opposite grammar points, which is very handy.

I won’t say that AI is perfect for language learning, but it has helped me tremendously. I usually ask ChatGPT things like, ‘Why are we using [this] instead of [that]?’ and it gives me the explanation I need to understand the nuances between [this] and [that] even better."

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#4

FubuMiOkaKoro’s comment above is really excellent, and the one thing I would add to it is that Japanese does not have a strict word order within sentences the way that English does. Japanese uses particles to indicate the topic, subject, and object of sentences no matter what order they appear in. Plus, Japanese sentences do not need both a subject and an object to be considered complete. To put a finer point on what FubuMiOkaKoro said, the sentence 読むのは私です。does not have an object (at least, not in the sense that I understand it).

Japanese is radically different from English, to the extent that trying to find an exact English equivalent for every Japanese sentence is nigh impossible. For that reason, as others have said, it’s a good idea to train your brain to understand Japanese as Japanese without straining to fit it into English grammatical frameworks.

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#5

I understand what you mean, and I think you’re right to want to think literally - it helps you break free from English grammar and shift your brain into Japanese.

I don’t know of any apps that do this either, so I learned to do it myself, often searching Youtube for in-depth guides on particles or grammar points until I found a ‘literal’ explanation and remembering that.

For this concept, you can just think of の as ‘thing’.
読むのは私です
As for (は) the thing (の) that (not needed in Japanese) reads (読む), it is (です) me (私)
That’s as literal as I can get it.

As for the reason you need の, this is very important. Any particle that marks a role (like は, が, を, に, etc. ）MUST mark a noun - so when you want to treat a verb as a noun, or an adjective as a noun, you must modify them first. With verbs, the way you do this is by simply attaching the verb (plain form) to another noun. In this case, the simplest of nouns - の.

For a bit extra, two other very common ways to say thing are こと and もの, the first of which is a general ‘thing’ and the latter a physical (non-living) object. Neither work here though, because you are neither.

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#6

Everyone has responded with phenomenal answers and I wanna bring up to, the general vagueness of translation as well. Not only Japanese but most languages. Its a struggle but trying to “literally” translate will most certainly harm you in the long run. Because English can be, and especially Japanese, loosy goosy with grammer once you reach a certain level. And many things end up having a cultural manner, and then the keigo gets in the way yada yada.

To use an example, Im actually playing a “game” with my students where we translate Pokémon entries and manga panels into english. I translate it myself, and have the other English teachers as well. The students pair up and translate it. My answer, the teachers answer, and the students answer are all drastically different but end up more or less meaning the same thing in line with the “official” translate.

読むのは私です I would actually translate to “I am the one reading” or even “Im the one(person) who read this”

Anyway, I can ramble but dont worry to much about literal translation because at a certain level it doesnt work, you just gotta kinda feel for it and the general meaning will come to you.

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#7

These are the same meanings though, right? One is just taken very literally while the other has been ‘translated’ into natural English.

The literal translation I think helps to see how sentences are ordered and constructed, although for longer sentences it probably isn’t practical

#8

Disagree on humans being superior. The human mind has limitations and the information they pull from becomes cloudy over time. Tech / AI / computers pull information directly from data. It doesn’t fade. My life has drastically improved and Ive been able to dig myself out of so many challenges since turning to AI to explain my problems and work through my theories than I ever had luck with when consulting humans. It is a human bias to presume humans can deliver better results than a computer. They cannot.

Side note, I have a running chat with my AI where I deconstruct Japanese grammar and vocabulary very deeply, to identify the “core essence”, the “connective tissue” imbedded in particles, phrases, vocabulary, characters, etc, that make seemingly insensible translations make complete sense, as well as seemingly different use cases for the same words / phrases / characters / particles all make sense given its “core essence”. Humans, when asked about these things, generally shrug it off and say things like “there’s no connection” or “it’s just a coincidence”, simply because they can’t see, or don’t have direct access to, the nuances that make those connections plausible.

Also, I find it is helpful to understand the literal construction, because it’s the only way to “think” in Japanese. You can’t expect to start to “think” in Japanese at the source, and stop rearranging and translating what you’re hearing from a Japanese speaker, and then doing the same for the thoughts in your head, if you have trained yourself to rearrange the language so that it only makes sense through the lens of proper English.

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#9

I’ve found CureDolly’s YouTube videos on Japanese From Scratch to be extremely helpful. The robotic voice takes a bit of getting used to, but then everything she says makes perfect sense.

She goes beyond explaining just the grammar points and delves into the philosophy behind the Japanese language, and why it’s often to hard to understand Japanese from an English background. I cannot recommend her videos enough.

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#10

Whichever limitations the human mind has is dwarfed by the limitiation of AI, in that AI lacks a mind entirely. Whatever depth you’re feeling from those chats is a gross imitation, meant to mimic humans.
So machines engage in long running chats with you, providing credible-sounding “information” because you’ve ordered them to do that and they have no free will.
Meanwhile, you say, humans shrug it off when you try to get into these sort of discussions, by using their free will?
Maybe your inability to get into deep conversations with humans isn’t a sign of limitations of the human mind in general, maybe you just lack conversational skills. And your ability to converse with humans isn’t going to improve if you prioritize AI over humans, when choosing who to speak with.
Humans are, and will always be, superior to machines.

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#11

I mean, they differ in meaning a little, and that difference would be up to the listener and situation. Literal translation gets in the way of understanding which is probably a better viewpoint of my argument. Since as OP says, the literal translation could seem weird, on top of an entire sentence likely being dropped. Understanding the role that のは serves and the gist of the sentence as a result, is far better than taking the time to manually dissect the entire sentence.

Again, translations tend to have a bit of ambiguity. Because of local slang, or even methods of speak ect. I will provide a useful example in my next sentence for EN->JP

now, I WILL say, if you’re straight up having Difficulties
(My use of slang here is more or less untranslatable literally into Japanese since it wouldn’t make sense, however its relatively common place, at least in America)

Now if you’re having difficulties with a specific piece of grammar and literally translating a few sentences helps, go ahead. I do see use in that, but when studying, I think having a foundation of what it is saying is more important. Then when its time to speak/listen, you’re not translating every word in your head.

Say youre a non-native speaker, you hear “straight up having difficulties”, there is a high chance you can put that aside, and continue. But if you get stuck trying to translate every sentence you hear/read then it will slow you down.

Basically I’m agreeing with that @FubuMiOkaKoro said at the beginning of the thread. We have ideas we are saying, and we are aiming for as close to that idea as possible in the target language.

#12

I see your point. Yes, if you were translating “if you’re straight up having difficulties” normally, you would omit the “straight up”. Translating it literally would sound really weird but it highlights its inclusion. You could explain that “straight up” means “direct” and “to the point” which helps you understand how and why it is used.

So I think the aim of translating piece by piece helps you (or at least me) to understand how each bit works together. Whereas a normal translation will give you something that sounds normal to a native speaker, which could mean you miss the nuance of the original sentence (because there is no natural translation)

This is fairly simple and contrived example, but many English translations would omit “younger” and “older” when referring to siblings because it’s quite unnatural to include that detail right. However, a more literally translation would include this information, highlighting its use.

I think learning with literal translations can help highlight the nuance, and also the reasoning behind why some words are used. I actually thought FubuMiOkaKoro’s direct translation of the Swedish word was quite useful in understanding its use!

Alas it depends on what each person prefers :woman_shrugging:

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#13

People are bad at utilizing AI in helpful ways, their expectations far exceed what they would expect even a human teacher to do and in turn they diminish the use case of it. They also ignore the fact it will only improve, mindlessly citing current perceived issues with it. Using AI the way you’re describing is immensely helpful with learning the language. Most words or phrases the AI will be able to give you a better description of its core logic than the average high level learner can, which provides much more value if you have an analytical mind.

Currently people are coping with the premise of AI and the possibilities it could potentially bring about in various ways, one of the common ways is to belittle and diminish its capabilities and pretend it isn’t happening. The human ego is an astonishing thing. I don’t think threads like these do much good as people have already made up their minds one way or another, so they will always seek out evidence that continues their world view. In reality whatever tool helps someone understand in the end is the best tool for them. I would ignore the responses you get on it, they are emotional and trauma dumping, not providing useful info.

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#14

Ichi.moe is a litteral sentence parser. Type in a sentence and it pulls the definition from jisho.

Not a beginner, it’s really interesting to be flexible with definitions

I have a English and Japanese example.
Example sentence: 噂を広めたくないから誰にも言うな！
Me of course! 広める 広い+める = spread cause when it’s spread it’s wider

Or ‘you’ll get the hang of the difference between 晴る and 晴らす’
Me: uh, I just remember them all as ‘clear’ as in
“I can see clearly now the rain has gone. Cleared all the obstacles in my way”

And in English class today the Japanese teacher wrote: following year = ファロー→追って行く→後へ続く→翌年

Or I looked up わざとよそよそしくしないでください。in weblio よそよそしく:親しみがない。他人行儀である。
Oh, so it’s “don’t be distant… on purpose”. On purpose… that’s the difference between ‘cruel’ and ‘cold’

#15

I’m not dogmatic or keeping my head in the sand. I specified it in my initial comment (but your comment reads as if you missed it) that I’m only talking about AI in a language learning context. I know that AI is useful for progress in other fields like medicine. So it has it’s uses but not in language learning, which is what this discussion was concerning.

Language requires the sort of nuance and reflection that can only be performed by a human brain. Everyone’s allowed their own opinion, but to disagree with my previous sentence in this paragraph, to me, indicates that one has a very limited view of linguistics.

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#16

The way you speak is exactly what I was referring to, you make absolute and definitive claims while providing no proof other than “if you disagree you just don’t get it as well as I do” as your logic, hiding it behind altered verbiage. I appreciate you illustrating my point, however this thread is about the user and their feedback on how they best learn so I am not going to go back and forth with you to feed your ego.

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#17

I also found her videos super helpful. I think the fact she approaches it from a different perspective than other resources is what is so valuable. I just couldn’t get it with the normal sites but I was able to get through the biggest hiccups through her way of framing thingz. She handled japnese more like a robot/ai or in her words “legos” and that was much easier for me.

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#18

That’s fair. “Agree to disagree” is a perfectly valid conclusion to discussions. I’m not claiming or believing to speak only in absolute truths here. These are my personal opinions I’m expressing here, obviously.

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#19

I feel like making it personal liek that over what they wrote it taking it a bit too far lol it doesnt mean they cant talk to people it aint that serious lmao

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#20

This is my final comment in this thread (I promise). Just adding a source to back up my stance, since apparently the burden of proof is on me for some reason.
Here’s Vesicularorb’s post complaining about AI being unable to explain は vs が, without giving conflicting explanations.

@Vesicularorb Please take this comment for what I intended. Just a friendly jab to relieve some of the tension in this thread, with me being the instigator of creating that unneeded tension. Sorry.

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