Hey,

I am think about making the cross over form simplified to traditional characters.  One of the motivations behind this is, when the time comes, the help, or not, it will give me when i learn japanese.

I have a vauge recolection of someone telling me that japanese uses traditional chinese characters, but i have no idea to what extent, after a spy on the internet and asking some chinese friends, i am still none the wiser.

Can anyone tell me how helpful a knowledge of tradtional chinese characters will be when i study japenese.

Thanks

Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, Chinese, English, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Thai, Urdu and Vietnamese translations of a relay poem inspired by the Earth and Space  http://www.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/sp/poem/index.html

this being a joint project of NHK World Radio Japan and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the majority of contributions are by Japanese (poets, and people from the general public).  one contribution is by award-winning Chinese poet and translator 田原; i'm not sure which language he wrote in for this.  the last two of the 26 poems will be added soon to complete the work.

i can't tell how good the Chinese translations are.  if anyone can give me feedback on that i'd really appreciate it.  as we all know poetry is very difficult to translate!

though i can't read them, the Arabic (Persian, Urdu also) and Bengali scripts are particularly beautiful to look at.  too bad they couldn't pick a nicer typeface for the Roman-letter languages.

to see the Japanese, visit JAXA's site and while you're there  take a look at the Space Poem Chain Gallery--kind of nice.

have a nice weekend all!

We're in Japan, browsing in a clothing and accessories shop. We see this sign by the fitting room. The original is Japanese--it's all good (on second thought, maybe not).** The English, Chinese and Korean must have been translated from the Japanese.

Is the Chinese 正确? The Korean?
Can you figure out what happened with the English--?

** edit：  Changye's point is well taken. The Japanese in the sign is no model either. It says

ご試着の際は、スタッフまでお声掛け下さい。
go-shichaku no sai wa, sutaffu (staff) made o-koe-kake kudasai

It would have been better to say

ご試着の際は、スタッフまで声をお掛け下さい。　
go-shichaku no sai wa, sutaffu (staff) made koe wo o-kake kudasai

The difference is where to place the honorific お "o". In the sign the decision to place it on 声 (apparently because it's the customer's voice and they thought it would be disrespectful not to place it there) resulted in the concoction of the "O-V" verb 声掛ける koe-kakeru which Changye and I agree is not good as a verb in Japanese.
Anyway 掛ける kake-ru is one of those verbs that need many different translations, collocate with so many different kinds of objects--and that is at the heart of the English disaster!

好，那今天的 J-Pod 初中级课程就到这儿！