Where are you from???

[a_Guest03]

Sou da ne?

"Is that so?", "Isn't that so?", "Eh, that's it, then?"

Ne as a suffix means, "know what I mean?". Women use it all the time, sometimes every sentence.

Everything is completely contextual. You look at someone and say, "Give me thing by you", instead of saying "Hand me that shiny object on the shelf". You either know what they mean or you don't. The words can have tons of uses, and the only way to tell the difference between many homonyms is how they are spelled. Hana means nose, but it also means flower. I think in one of the three alphabets, the spelling is different. In the other two, there's no difference at all. There are so many example, but they just don't work hard to make themselves understood completely. If you basically understand, that's good enough. Never try to get a native Japanese man to sign a contract if he's not educated in Western affairs. For one, he won't understand all the gibberish. Secondly, when they translate to Japanese, you just can't have legal details. It all becomes transparent generalities.

What's Japanese for "you know what I mean"?

According to http://world.altavista.com/, it is

私が意味するものをあなたは知っているか.

[a_Guest03]

Don't ask me to read that. I never learned kanji, just conversational Japanese to get by when I was a kid. I can read the hiragana and katakana, but that's it.

Once you learn Kanji, you can write decent Japanese details (somewhat), but vocalizing the words won't make a difference.

[flyrken]

Isn't that the problem with all written languages being translated.

Take any specification and have it translated to another language. It will lose about 70% functionality due to generalizations of language translation. Take a scientific language (French) and translate to English. Not very "descriptive!" word for word, the translator has to know the subject materials also.

Need more? http://www.xlation.com/essays/cflick.php

Thank you for sharing this tidbit of information.
I now know to be a little more patient when the "generalized" statements appear in translated specifications. (Root meaning "Specific", not generalized) :P


As with all whom know about running products and/or projects, the devil is in the details. What do you without a good specification that documents these details or existing base to reverse engineer or compare?

BTW, Who wrote the EQemulator specification?

Anyone?

Mueller?
Mueller?
Mueller?

j/k

EOF

Maybe the Japanese like to be mysterious, and never completely understood. Makes them more life like doesn't it?

Well a_Guest03 he wasnt married and didnt have any kids when he went over there. He got married to a local girl had kids ect ect ect.

[a_Guest03]

Even among themselves, one can never REALLY know what they're saying. I understand that translation loses meaning, but they just don't put the meaning in there.