My first

[Eyaw_Nayr]

I took my first Japanese class yesterday, and I am excited in what I can learn already. Just for practice purposes with typing japanese I am going to post some really elementary sentences below. Can you just check to make sure they are sound?

わたしわ日本語の学生です。

あなたわフランス語の学生でわりません。

This didn't come out too well in google translator when I double-checked it, but they are supposed to be "I am a Japanese-Language student" and "I am not a French-Language student"

Any comments and critisizms(can't speak english either apparently) are openly accepted.

[defrex]

The particle 'wa' is は not　わ. As in:
私は日本語の学生です。
私＝わたし　

^_^

[Schattenjedi]

Eyaw_Nayr wrote:
あなたわフランス語の学生でわりません。

あなたはフランス語の学生ではありません。

[defrex]

Oh, also, あなた (anata) = you.
You're second statement would read 'You are not a french student'.

がんばって

[TrilinguisT]

tabun tensai desu ne! kinou hajemeta tokoro to itta ndesu..

boku mo nihongo no seito desu.

furansugo wo naraitakunai ndesu yo.

[Eyaw_Nayr]

defrex wrote:
The particle 'wa' is は not　わ. As in:
私は日本語の学生です。
私＝わたし　

^_^

ありがとう

I am confused on how to input the は character. whenever I type "watashiwa" I get
わたしわ

How do I input the は character as a particle? I am very new to using the IME, so forgive me if this is obvious.

[Eyaw_Nayr]

Eyaw_Nayr wrote:

defrex wrote:
The particle 'wa' is は not　わ. As in:
私は日本語の学生です。
私＝わたし　

^_^

ありがとう

I am confused on how to input the は character. whenever I type "watashiwa" I get
わたしわ

How do I input the は character as a particle? I am very new to using the IME, so forgive me if this is obvious.

nevermind, I got it thanks to the nice boys over at the chat.

わたしは日本語の学生です。

[CrazzyWarrior]

TrilinguisT wrote:
tabun tensai desu ne! kinou hajemeta tokoro to itta ndesu..

boku mo nihongo no seito desu.

furansugo wo naraitakunai ndesu yo.

nothing big, just a typo on there, it should be desu rather then ndesu. i just dont want people to get confused. no japanese words start with 'n' alone, they can be na, ni, nu, ne, or no, tho. anyway thats all for now.

[hungryhotei]

No. That 'n' is correct. It is an abbreviation of 'no'. The explanative 'no'
(see guidetojapanese.com or somewhere)

Whithout the 'n' the sentencewould be wrong because desu shouldn't follow the plain past.

[MFoogle]

you can use this site to double check your work:

http://babelfish.altavista.com/

[hungryhotei]

I think I said on another thread but babelfish just produces gibberish so I would stay as far away from it as possible. These are much better sites to double check your work:
http://www.google.com
http://www.thejapanesepage.com

[MFoogle]

yah, a lot of time it produces jibberish, but it also works pretty good. i copied and pasted Eyaw_Nayr's first sentence but it produced gibberish. then i copied and pasted Schattenjedi's first post on this and it came out as "I dont understand French". so sometimes, it does work.

[hungryhotei]

But the same sentence E-J gives 私はフランス語を理解しない, which I wouldn't recommend saying. Any time that it does give a remotely appropriate answer just will be a fluke and at the same time so incredibly easy that there is no point looking.

[Sachi]

Besides, if you reply on a translator, you'll never really learn, and might learn things the wrong way. (Just wanted to add that point )

By the way, good job Eyaw_Nayr-san! がんばってね！

[CajunCoder]

Do not use babble fish or any other automatic translator for anything more than entertainment (which can be quite fun... after a few minutes of translating from language to language, my brother once got "I keep extreme by the english cake" out of "I like cake very much".)
I've tried putting in even the simplest of sentences, and it still manages to mess everything up... The languages are simply too different to translate automatically - even if a human were to translate japanese directly into english, it would come out incomprehensable.
I do like how you can tell when japanese is automatically translated to english, though. People constantly refer to themselves, you, and all other omitted subjects as "it" :p