つかえる英会話Daily / Travel

Yoko: Why is the “writing” part so important?

Patterson: Because sometimes you don’t realize you’ve miscomprehended the sentence or your translation doesn’t make sense, until you actually write it down on a piece of paper.

Yoko: Oh…I see.

Patterson: Suppose you have a sentence, “I’ve picked up on that”. When you read it, you might think, “Oh, it means ‘watashi wa sore o hirotta'”. This translation is wrong, because it doesn’t translate the word “on”. People like you…someone who has lived in America for some time and thinks she’s pretty good at English…often unknowingly take away or add certain words when reading, in order to “suit” what she wishes the sentence to mean. Herein lies the rub.

Yoko: Oh…you’re right. I sometimes create my own meaning!

Patterson: The reason why the translator missed the word “on” is that she saw the phrase “pick up” and thought, “Oh, I know this idiom”, and translated it as “hirotta” without a second thought. But eventually, you would realize your original translation doesn’t fit in the context. This realization is very important because then, you can go back to square one and become more flexible. When you’re stuck, try every possible translation, every possible way to “cut” the sentence into chunks. OK…you think there might be an idiom “up on” or, why not “pick up on”? Does “that” mean something special here?…etc. You question yourself over and over until you finally get the answer: I’ve/picked up on/that, meaning “wakatta”. Of course, reading comprehension contains a lot longer and complicated sentences but the logic is the same: try every possible way to cut every sentence into segments and write translation down until you have a satisfactory answer.

Yoko: I understand.

Patterson: Now, you can’t explore such possibilities without a good dictionary. Dictionaries of poor quality can discourage students. Here’s my list of recommended English-Japanese dictionaries for entrance exams: Genius by Taishukan, and Progressive by Shogakukan…these two are good for students who are not 100% sure about the grammar. The number of entries is not so large, yet they both provide excellent grammatical explanations. Whereas, Readers by Kenkyusha has 270,000 entries. Reading comprehension of entrance exams often include big words, 99% of which you’d find in this amazing dictionary. And the words you can’t find in Readers, you should look up in Kenkyusha’s Daieiwa dictionary. Every big library in town houses this huge dictionary, so you don’t need to buy it.