Help with japanese character translation

Probably a stupid first-grade japanese question, but since I'm teaching myself I'm obviously not that far along

In GSG vol 10, frame 130:2-2, second line from right, fifth character down, there's a line, like a lower case L "l", between ya and ni.. What is that? I seem to remember it as designating "1", but the only thing I can find is the kanji for rod/line. Obviously "1" might be out of context, but I can't figure out exactly what it is, and since it crops up so often in text, it is probably something I should have.

Panzer...?

That doesn't help.


Oh, you're summonning Panzer to help. I see..

I believe it is a chōonpu.

Pocky, for example, is spelled ポッキー and the ー at the end is a chōonpu.

Thanks, that certainly helps a bit. If only Rosetta Stone wasn't so freaking much repetition, I'd be picking it up quicker. You can only look at the same damn picture of a aircraft with a kid under it so many times.

maverick375 wrote:That doesn't help.

You have no idea.

Any recommendations on decent translation software? BabelFish is structurally insufficient, as the AllYourBase-ese I get from it is less intelligible than Zero Wing was. I can get the gist of it, but only after playing with it in my head for a long while.

The sentence is:
マリオやヒルシヤーに聞かされた己の来歴は
or as I read it:
mario ya hirushiyaa ni ki kasareta kono rai reki wa
which Babelfish translates as: As for career of oneself which tells to [mario] and the hill shear
(BTW, I know I suck at languages, having forgotten most of my three years of HS spanish)
Insights, structure help, preferably of a constructive nature. I'm trying to learn here.

Kisk hit the nail right on the head (yeah, now you get it - those transliterations you sent me for chapter 59 used ichi instead of chōonpu and I didn't catch it at first -_-).

Here's the thing: In horizontal writing ichi looks like 一 and the chōonpu looks like ー. (Ichi goes straight and if it has any flourishes it's a hook-back upward at the end, chōonpu curves downward before going straight.) In vertical writing ichi still looks like 一 but chōonpu curves from the left and goes straight down. One last thing: Yu never uses 一 when it means "one" - he uses １ instead. Ex: he writes hitori as １人 instead of the normal 一人, but writes isshoni as 一緒に.

If you want to learn to read Japanese, the fastest way is to play Slime Forest - a cheesy but useful rpg. After that, practice looking up kanji and translating words with JWPce.

As for translating websites, Google Translate is the best one out there, though sometimes it's good to reference back to Babelfish.

ヒルシヤー = Hillshire. In that sentence Triela is basically saying that Mario and Hillshire told her about her past. Blast, I thought for certain that I had already finished translating that section and had posted it. I guess I need to hurry and do that...

p.s.: Those are really bad sentences to learn Japanese with - I struggled with that section myself, so it's pretty hard. I remember reading a chapter with Petra and Sandro behind a building on some stairs fighting someone. That chapter was easy to read in Japanese, but I can't figure out which one it was now... Anyway, it's a bad idea to rack your brain over tough sentences early on - just look for the easy ones for now.

I find Google Translate to be a bit better, but it's still weak on Japanese.

KodokuRyuu wrote:Kisk hit the nail right on the head (yeah, now you get it - those transliterations you sent me for chapter 59 used ichi instead of chōonpu and I didn't catch it at first -_-).

Yeah, I didn't catch it until later, alas.

ヒルシヤー = Hillshire. In that sentence Triela is basically saying that Mario and Hillshire told her about her past.

Yeah, the proper nouns I can get for the most part. A few of the Italian places confuse me at times, since Yu uses the Italian name for them rather than the English name that I'm used to. (e.g. Milano= Milan) I don't blame him for it, though, as it's unreasonable to expect the whole world to revolve around Western understandings, even if we ARE the center of the universe and all .
Thanks for the info. After an hour or so of staring at that sentence and the translated words I wrote down, I got the idea of it. Two hours a thought balloon is good, right?

maverick375 wrote:Thanks for the info. After an hour or so of staring at that sentence and the translated words I wrote down, I got the idea of it. Two hours a thought balloon is good, right?

I like to transcribe the characters just to gain some experience in looking them up and trying to recognize them.

maverick375 wrote:A few of the Italian places confuse me at times, since Yu uses the Italian name for them rather than the English name that I'm used to. (e.g. Milano= Milan) I don't blame him for it, though, as it's unreasonable to expect the whole world to revolve around Western understandings, even if we ARE the center of the universe and all .

Actually it's not just Yu - Japanese itself uses the Italian pronunciation.

Let me introduce you to translating Japanese-Italian to English:

1. First, go to the Japanese Wikipedia and look up the word you want (e.g. ミラノ).
   
2. Now click the link on the left that says "English", which will take you to the English article on the subject (e.g. Milan).
   

An alternative if you think you know what the Italian spelling is:

1. Go to the Italian Wikipedia and look up the Italian word you believe it to be (e.g. Milano).
   
2. Now, just like before, click "English".
   

Voilà. You know the word now and you didn't have to mess with bad translating software. Of course, the first method only works with common Italian words (like cities and such), but with some working you translate just about anything using the tools I've mentioned in this thread.

maverick375 wrote:Thanks for the info. After an hour or so of staring at that sentence and the translated words I wrote down, I got the idea of it. Two hours a thought balloon is good, right?

Uh...

OKay... the rpg was pretty good for learning. But now I'm in frame Vol10 pg130-3. First Kanji in second line reads Obaro, which the translator above (thanks for that also), reconizes as "dream/haze"

So.... the sentence:夢のまた夢朧の彼方にあって実感はない
translates to(via Google) "Beyond the (haze) realize there is no dream".
Is this some kind of poetic quote? Did I even get it close? Is it some other proper noun, as neither the Italian nor Japanese Wiki can find it.
I'm almost to the point of begging for the rest of the vol10 scanlation.

maverick375 wrote:First Kanji in second line reads Obaro, which the translator above (thanks for that also), reconizes as "dream/haze"

Obaro? Never heard that one before. 夢, in most cases including this one, means "dream" and is pronounced yume.

maverick375 wrote:So.... the sentence:夢のまた夢朧の彼方にあって実感はない
translates to(via Google) "Beyond the (haze) realize there is no dream".
Is this some kind of poetic quote? Did I even get it close? Is it some other proper noun, as neither the Italian nor Japanese Wiki can find it.

I'll have to get back with you on this one - it's still giving me a bit of a headache. Yu sometimes uses complicated ways of saying simple things - it may sound cool, but it's really annoying to a translator.

maverick375 wrote:I'm almost to the point of begging for the rest of the vol10 scanlation.

And I'd love to give it to you, but it um *cough* isn't translated yet. You seriously should practice on easier text - this stuff is like native level or at least fluent level (whatever it is, it's just a little beyond my knowledge of the language *annoyed* ).

Oh yeah, forgot about this: the same dictionary in JWPce can be found online. It's called WWWJDIC. JWPce is a bit easier to work with though.