Alternate method of translating VNs

[Okarin]

DISCLAIMER: This method has no warranty, nobody ensures you'll translate your VNs with this.

Hey everyone, I'm working on understanding a short VN I picked, and I'm using this method that I'll present here.

I'm using as a main tool the WWWJDIC page, along with a reference dictionary I bought online and a handbook to write down the kana and scribble the translation next to them.

I already tried this back in 2000 I think, I was a teenager at the time and could grasp new things more easily (then again, maybe not), so I was trying to translate a volume of Japanese "Golden Boy". Note that I already had a good grasp on English, that I use as a middle language between Japanese and Spanish (and damn, is it good at that).

I used practically the same method back then, using the then-version of JDIC that was a black-screen program facilitated by a national manga magazine (it came in one of their CDs).

So, here you have the main page of WWWJDIC: http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic?1C

 

Now, onto Kanji Hunt (TM)!

What is Kanji Hunt?

Well, it's the thing you're gonna spend lots of hours with if you choose this method. Your goal is to retrieve all your kanji meanings (in English) from the WWWJDIC website.

How to do it?

I recommend a series of resources to get the kanji meanings.

First, you have to find the proper kanji. Long story short, kanji are built upon a series of "radicals". Choose the menu "Multi-radical kanji" on WWWJDIC and choose your radical. They come arranged by stroke counts (stroke count: the number of brush strokes the kanji has in traditional Japanese calligraphy), so you can help yourself this way. Note that with very common radicals you will need to choose additional radicals or the search will yield no results, or to be more precise, too many results.

When you've found the kanji, write down its meaning, and its KUN and ON readings, they will come in handy in the future.

What if I don't find my kanji?

There are less desirable methods of finding your kanji. As I know nothing and less of kanji, I tend to resort to stroke count. In "Kanji lookup", you can search by stroke count, reading and so on. But... do you know how many 5-stroke kanji there are? This is madness, man. Use only as a last resort.

Knowing simple kanji beforehand would be best, but alas.

Multi-radical kanji

Some kanji are compounds of other kanji. Use the multi-radical kanji search to find your base radicals and then click the appropriate button to make a search. Stroke count comes in handy here... if you've got a talent to figure out how many strokes a kanji has. You can help yourself looking up the strokes for a given radical.

Multi-kanji words

Of course, there are some simple base kanji, that are built into more complex kanji, which in turn are built into complete multi-kanji words (like those long words in German ["Komposita"], only that the Japanese compress their reading into a couple of syllables).

How to get their whole meaning, you say?

Well, once you've found one of the kanji that comprise the word, there's a neat "Search" button that you can use to find words with that kanji in them. But before that, set if your kanji is in the first position or not in the side options.

 

WWWJDIC also sports some hiragana expressions that use no kanji (such as "na no ni", for example), but a good dictionary comes in handy.

I guarantee that you'll find most kanji this way, and the rest is just grinding.

It's very useful to write down a kanji once you've found its meaning, as to reuse it in the future. "Don't lose it, reuse it!" Right, Rocky?

 

This method gives you tons of hours of grinding... I mean, fun, so use it only if you've got plenty of time to burn, but in the end, it's like a brute-force attack on those pesky Japanese VNs. I certainly wouldn't recommend brute-forcing a Key novel (unless it was Harmonia or Planetarian).

Edited May 29, 2017 by Okarin

[Vokoca]

Nice write up, you clearly put quite a lot of work into it, but... I don't really get what the point of this is. What are you trying to do exactly? Learn Japanese? Translate a visual novel? Read a Japanese VN without much understanding of the language?

There are easier ways to go about almost all of these. Using a text hooker would probably help you with all three of these - there's no point in manually looking up every single word when you can just copy the text out, and there are text parsers that can look up the definitions for you on the fly, too. For translation, you could just use a CAT tool to build your translation database, so you don't lose the things you've already translated. You might potentially remember things a little bit better if you write them down by hand and look them up each time like you said, but I don't think that's really worth it given the time-investment, especially if your goal is just to read.

Edited May 29, 2017 by Vokoca

[Toranth]

Actually, that's pretty much the way I learned Japanese back when I was starting.  It works, if you really put the time into it.  It is hardly the most efficient method, but it is practicing the same time as actually doing the fun activity that is your goal.  It took me a full year or so to get good enough to read something like Kanon without needing to look up much.  It's all about constant practice.

 

About the only suggestion I would make is to also practice writing, especially the kana.  I used to spend a lot of down time on the train writing out all the kana - left to right, then right to left, top to bottom then back, sometimes hiragana, others katakana.  Also practiced a few of the more common kanji (pronouns, basic words like 'go' or 'hot'), and a bunch of conjugations.  After a year of that, it was easy to pass the JLPT level 2, which meant that aside from vocabulary most VNs were also pretty easy.

Well, actually, one more suggestion - Buy a decent reference book or three.  I've gotten a great deal of use out of "A Dictionary of [Basic | Intermediate | Advanced] Japanese Grammar", a set of three books that are excellent references for grammar.  With their help, even the most, er, 'interesting' writers (Nasu, you punk) can make sense.  It looks like those specific books may have gone out of print, so are expensive, but finding a good grammar reference is pretty essential.

[Okarin]

I would really love to get the kanji readings in a text hooker, but sadly ITH doesn't work on my Windows 10 installation.

Keep in mind that I consider this to be a brute-force attack on Japanese text. It's not time-efficient. But this way, hopefully, you will get to learn the kanji, and in the long run, you'll get a better understanding of the text and read faster. There's almost nothing repetition can't achieve.

Also I know most hiragana and katakana (some are starting to fade away in my mind), that I learned back in the day.

[ChaosRaven]

2 hours ago, Okarin said:

I would really love to get the kanji readings in a text hooker, but sadly ITH doesn't work on my Windows 10 installation.

But you did try ITH-VNR instead of just IHT, did you?! Since ITH not working on Win10 is a known problem and ITH-VNR was then released precisely to avoid that problem.

Though if ITH-VNR doesn't work on your system you might be really out of luck, since Chiitrans was murdered with Microsoft's new Creator's Update and its updated .NET version. And not to mention the little DOS box that was popping up every hour since then because the MS Office programmers apparently didn't know what they are doing either. But well, that's another story... 

Edited May 30, 2017 by ChaosRaven

[Okarin]

28 minutes ago, ChaosRaven said:

But you did try ITH-VNR instead of just IHT, did you?! Since ITH not working on Win10 is a known problem and ITH-VNR was then released precisely to avoid that problem.

Though if ITH-VNR doesn't work on your system you might be really out of luck, since Chiitrans was murdered with Microsoft's new Creator's Update and its updated .NET version. And not to mention the little DOS box that was popping up every hour since then because the MS Office programmers apparently didn't know what they are doing either. But well, that's another story... 

Neat information. I'm so off with these things...

[Akimoto Masato]

lets say i throw away my knowledge of the japanese language and act if im just a new comer and and have no idea what the japanese culture is and about. i still dont see where this would come into play, if i was trying to learn maybe, but i dont see a practical use, although im still going to use this as to further learn what i havent in the past

[Okarin]

I know there's more than kanji in a sentence, but kanji are the bread and butter of it. If you understand them, you can picture what the sentence means.

Just like a Google search, we don't put prepositions and complex conjugations in those, and the language used is pretty raw, but we can understand what someone is searching for.

It's still not a great translation, but.

Also, what's with "no idea what the Japanese culture is"? If you aren't interested in Japan, why are you reading Japanese? I thought all VN fans started as avid anime fans. The one doesn't preclude the other.

[Fred the Barber]

10 hours ago, Okarin said:

I know there's more than kanji in a sentence, but kanji are the bread and butter of it. If you understand them, you can picture what the sentence means.

Just like a Google search, we don't put prepositions and complex conjugations in those, and the language used is pretty raw, but we can understand what someone is searching for.

It's still not a great translation, but.

Also, what's with "no idea what the Japanese culture is"? If you aren't interested in Japan, why are you reading Japanese? I thought all VN fans started as avid anime fans. The one doesn't preclude the other.

Pretty strongly disagree with that first line. Understanding grammar (particles and verb conjugations, especially, are deep wells) is essential to really grasping the meaning of most of what you'll read. Without those, yeah, you may know some of the actors and some of the actions and some of the descriptions, but you're often not going to be able to piece together what applies to what, and you're going to go off the rails often and not be able to appreciate a lot of what you're nominally reading. Like Toranth said, boning up on grammar is essential.