For people like me who read Raws and dont know Jap add this to your google and bing translator this one gives me good insight and comprehension maybe this can help you i dunno if this has great accuracy but its good for me and im using this Heres the link www.excite.co.jp/world/english_japanese/
you need 15 messages iirc on the thread before you can post a link www.excite.co.jp/world/english_japanese/
I've always used excite. It's not all that accurate to be frank and you still need basic knowledge of Japanese grammar and syntax but it's better than most others. Like GT, this is actually more of a supplementary tool if you already know bits of Japanese but don't know enough. I actually avoided mentioning this because I used to use this when I translated Japanese novels in the past and I didn't want people to know I actually machine translated the stuff. I still can't understand how people can machine translate using google. But hey, I didn't say I didn't machine translated either and I didn't ask for money, so it's fine
I don't think its considered MTL if your just using some things as supplementary tools. Some use the MTL as their exclusive tool and just re-edit what it spits out. Where as you are taking the time to completely deconstruct the sentence to get its full meaning out of it(that human element is important). Like if that was considered MTL just using like a online Kanji dictionary would practically make everyone as an MTLer. So I would say your hand translating it still, just not as the same speed as the person who is fluent in it. MTL hardly ever captures word inflections and connotations that follow with those words.. Which can dynamically change a sentence's meaning completely. I know for a fact there are some Kanji that even the average Japanese person doesn't know and has to look up with a Kanji dictionary periodically or ask someone else... I recall finding some words that are not in the English-Japanese dictionary... I have to look it up in a Japanese dictionary and translate that definition to get the meaning into English...
Yup... Around 2,000 average Kanji japanese people need to know (more exactly, 2,136 in the Jōyō Kanji). But unfortunately there are over 50,000 (and there isn't even real agreement on the total number, Zhonghua Zihai lists 85,000+). IMO, easy way to tell if someone is using machine translation or just using supplementary tools: Can they accurately translate (or at least understand) puns? Oh well. in the meantime, enjoy this old video of someone writing 100,000+ kanji (no idea where the 100,000+ figure came from... Variations maybe?) Edit: You might want to mute the video though... The background music is... unique to put nicely.
That doesn't surprise me... There were additions added in the modern era... Even the Japanese HATE kanji... But, they learn it because they have to learn it not cause they want to... It's like how US still learns imperial measurements as well as metric... I really hate using imperial but its hard to just immediately change from using foots and pounds when you have been using it for so long. Metric is far more convenient since it logically connects to so many other systems of measurements and doing so gives better calculations in the long run. English isn't an efficient system in terms of its grammar rules but its writing and vocabulary system has some efficiency that Japanese doesn't have in terms of using 26 letters to form any word. Japanese use 48(96 if katakana is included, and ALOT more if kanji is included in that) but also need to use kanji in various circumstances because they reuse ALOT of words for different things... Off the top of my head I can only think of one word that is really reused in common usage in english and that is the word "saw". Which can be past tense of to see and or a tool used for cutting. There are many words in english that have overlapping meaning but definition of the word doesn't vary much between words at least in common everyday usage. Japanese... words like rock, doctor, to say, to be, to buy, to go.... The list goes on for commonly used words... All those words have multiple meanings depending on context so the usage of kanji becomes a bit of a needed convention to distinguish in writing... I remember one instance I was chatting with a Japanese player and I read 十分 as meaning 10 minutes(which it does btw)... じゅっぷん(juppun)... So I thought he wanted me to like wait 10 minutes so I responded with saying I would wait 10 minutes... Which he turned around and said no... saying he meant 十分... Which I said ya... じゅっぷｎ(10 minutes)... he then had to type out the furigana to me... じゅうぶん(juubun), until I understood what he meant... 十分<- 10 minutes also means "it's enough" exact same kanji.... Just read differently... These are many of those moments you just want to wonder who wrote this language at times...
I try not to think about who is writing languages. Whenever I do I think about what 95% of the definitions on Urban Dictionary are like and I promptly try to ignore them all.
Pretty sure the idea of that video isn't that he's writing 100,000 different kanji, but that he is doing repetitions of different kanjis and in total reaches the number 100,000. Just like I may choose a few letters of the alphabet, write them in a notebook and then say I wrote 100,000 letters.
Oh well. Either way more effort than I'd want to go to. Assuming each kanji too 3 seconds to write, and it's all he did for 8 hours a day it would still be close to 3.5 days worth of effort.