Thanks for the feedback you've given Darius (and everyone) - I doubt I'd have been able to make the changes I have without it
If you have any changes you'd like, I think now is the time to mention them
on the cards are translation "tabs" so only one translation is shown at once in bilingual posts, and possibly "This post was translated by..." etc notices
I wonder if meta.japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/1351/… can be featured, or made into a bug or something as well - ultimately it's not up to me whether it's added to the mobile site, though I can add support for it in JavaScript
With the formatting syntax discoverability requests at meta.japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/1364/…, I'm still not sure what I'll do about it, but whatever I do I'd like to make it so it's more likely to survive SE website changes and keep it simple
Regarding the comment about pronunciation - For individual words it doesn't matter, but imageine reading out an entire sentence written in romaji as a beginner. You may hit each word properly, but your overall sentence rhythm will be off. When you use the syllabary, each symbol is one syllable and you can read it similar to how you read musical notes. — Brandin15 hours ago
I need someone to translate that for me... I can't even figure out what the claim is
I wonder if it has to do with the binariness of the state? You are either married or not, you can't be half married. But you can be partially able to do something.
Which is why どんどんできるようになっている or ますますできるようになっている work but neither of those adverbs seem to work with 結婚している (to me -- or at least it feels really forced).
To pick another 瞬間動詞... どんどん死んでいる... hmm. Feels slightly better than どんどん結婚している but not nearly as good as どんどんできるようになっている to me.
When I heard a phrase どんどん死んでいる, It sounds like alot of people dying here and there or something.It's hardly possible to think it's a someone's behavior.
I'm really intrigued by @suish use of "idiomatic expression" for 最初. I see that for the Japanese wikipedia, it explains any 2 kanji compound is a 熟語 since each character functions independently in Chinese, but I've always seen thinks like 最初 as individual "words". Is thinking in terms of 熟語 for words like [昼食]{ちゅうしょく} a concept that crosses the mind of native and non-native speakers respectively?
Anonymous
The idea that Mandarin is still a monosyllabic language is basically a myth. It was clearly true historically but doesn't make sense as a claim any longer. The Chinese languages have been moving toward a disyllabic vocabulary long-term because of the simplification of the syllable, and Mandarin is further along than most. Chinese once had a maximal syllable of CCCVCCC but doesn't any longer, and disyllabification solves the homophone problems created by the simplification
Anonymous
Of course Chinese, whether we're talking about Middle Chinese or modem, doesn't tell us anything about whether something is a word in Japanese
@snailboat I'm not trying to assert 1 character = 1 word in Chinese, I'm relaying that this is what I read in the 熟語 page on Japanese wikipedia. I'm intrigued / in disbelief about the claim that 最初 is an "idiomatic expression" (which i would take to be an expression that is an idiom) unless any two words or compound of two words is an "idiomatic expression"
@Unknown That's an excellent question and very difficult to translate. In a sense this is kind of like 「もう（遅いから、）寝ましょう」 so the もう is "already" or "soon". But there's also an aspect of emphasizing the speaker's feelings. The speaker wants the person they are addressing to sleep (or at least thinks the person they are addressing should sleep or will sleep soon). It's very difficult to capture this meaning and nuance while at the same time the common usage of this phrase (which is very common in Japanese). In English adults will say to kids "time for bed", but between adults is much rarer. — jhenn1 hour ago
Japanese Language
Japanese Language