Electra and I found an awesome site called Lang-8 that acts as a special journaing site. You make posts in a foreign language that you are studying. Then native speakers correct your writing. It’s pretty addictive. We’ve been correcting lots of English and are amazed at how quickly the Japanese members jump in to correct our stuff. I decided that since I never write anything here, I should cross-post so my friends at home can see what I’m writing about.
The Japanese is pre-corrections. So it contains (numerous) errors.
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Today was a little rough. It was blizzarding in Sapporo. Despite a cough and a runny nose, I walked from the subway station to the clinic through the strong wind. But I wasn’t able to make an appointment. However, the nurses were very helpful. They recommend a clinic near my house.
However, I did have another issue besides the cold. So they also recommended Hokkaido University Hospital. The problem is, Hokkaido University campus is close to the clinic, but the university hospital is far away. So I left for the campus. The campus is beautiful. It’s especially beautiful with the snow piled up. But the wind (and my cold)1 were really rough, so I never made it to the hospital. Halfway across campus, I decided to go back home.
Now I’m taking it easy. This is much better, I think.
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今日はちょっと大変でした。札幌に吹雪きました。せきとはなみずが出たのに、地下鉄駅から病院まで強い風に通りました。でも、病院に予約をできませんでした。しかし、病院で、看護師がよく手伝いました。家の近い病院を勧めました。
でも、風邪以外の希望としましたから、北海道大学病院も勧めました。問題は、北海道大学の構内は病院の近いですけど、大学の病院は遠かったです。そして、構内へ行きました。構内は美しい。特別に、雪が積もって美しかったです。でも、風（と風邪）は大変でしたから、大学病院に着きませんでした。構内を通る途中、家に戻ると決めました。
今のんびりしています。これの方がいいと思います。
- This is a pun. In Japanese, the word for “wind” and the word for “cold” (sickness) sound the same. [↩]
You make posts in a foreign language that you are studying. Then native speakers correct your writing.
That is so cool. There’s an exciting side benefit, too: with a bigger multilingual corpus, machine translation can get better and better (although never as good as expert human translation, naturally).
A while ago, Alex and I decided that we (well, mostly he; I don’t know how to do this stuff) want to develop a system that searches for and suggests cross-language puns! I’m not sure if there would be many practical applications, but it would be freakin’ sweet.
I was thinking similar things. Not so much the pun stuff. But there is an enormous amount of golden information about phrase translation among various languages buried in that site. And most of it is highly redundant (I think that’s a good thing.)
Lately I’ve found that Google’s Japanese< ->English machine translation is pretty impressive. In fact, I’ve discovered that one way I can verify that I’m typing a phrase with the right grammatical bits is to put it into Google translator. If it spits out the right English phrase, I know I’ve got it right. If it doesn’t, I know I’ve got some little bit wrong. I’m hoping for a day when machine translation can provide instant, accurate feedback like that for entire languages. It would make learning a lot faster.