!? ... Shiga prefecture and Aichi prefecture are not adjacent ...!?

Today, I happened to look on a color-coded map of Japan, and for the first time learned that thing with astonishment.

Perhaps, there might be people other than me who wrongly think Shiga prefecture and Aichi prefecture are adjacent. Or rather ... most people know it right?

To think of this, by the way, I knew, however, that Germany and Italy are not adjacent (Austria is interposed between the two countries). It's a tidbit of knowledge I've got about geography.

As I've written before, I'm writing this blog by writing in English at the same time checking the Google Translate's translation into Japanese. But this English-to-Japanese style might be half of the potential of Google Translate as a language learning tool. That is, it would also b useful to utilize Japanse-to-a-foreign-language translation by Google Translate.

English-to-Japanese translation is useful in English writing practice like in this blog. Changing the direction the other way round, Japanse-to-English translation, that is, your writing in Japanese then checking Google Translate's English translation, would be useful as an English reading practice.

But what I suggest here is that using Google Translate would be very useful to learn not only English but another foreign language.

For exmple, if you start to learn Spanish, the following might be suggested as an effective course to learn it concerning the reading skill.

(1) Besides studying the basic grammar and the basic vocabulary of Spanish, you can use Google Translate, writing in English then checking its Spanish outputs. The reason why writing in English is that basically many of European languages are more similar to each other than Japanese is similar to English and other European languages. Particularly, it seems that many of major Western languages such as English, French, Spanish, Italian etc. are structurally fairly similar in comparison to non-Western or non-European languages, at least at the surface and at a rough glance. So at this step, the word-to-word-level mutual checking between English and Spanish is effective than using Japanese. By the way, at this starting level, I think I can recommend you to read "language modules" which Tokyo University of Foreign Studies provides.

(2) After finishing basic grammar and vocabulary, you can read Spanish text at an elementary level of fluency. And you can prepare Spanish reading material with Google Translate. You can copy-paste English sentences in web pages you're reading onto Google Translate box and see the Spanish translation. Better still, you can write your thoughts randomly and whimsically in Japanese on that box and see the Spanish translation. The advantage of writing Japanese is that you can do this without ado of copy-paste, and you can do this at any time if you like as you surf the net.

(3) After the second step, probably you would be able to read a fairly vast range of Spanish text. You would read Spanish webpages, Spanish books, etc. as you like, in order to further develop your Spanish reading skill.

By the way, maybe you would not able to apply this method to classical languages such as Latin. Though I don't know well concerning around this matter, I feel I read several bad reputations in Twitter or somewhere some time ago that Google Translate's Latin translation is comparatively of unsatisfactory quality (I don't know whether it has got better now.)

Google Translate, as machine translation, is not perfect. It fairly often gives erroneous translation. Even if it apperas syntactically right translation, it can be the case that the meaning of words are not quite right. This point must be always noted when you read the translation, of course.

I was reading a English webpage ... and now I've come across a phrase:

Dream on

And from this, I remembered something of a piece of trivia about "ドラえもん":

It is known to fairly large population that the arrangement of letters "Doraemon" can be given as an anagram of the phrase "dream on" (with another o added). Search by "ドラえもん dream on" on Twitter, and you will find many tweets about that.

But what is the meaning of "dream on"? I looked it up with Wiktionary for this time ... and found that, as a verb, it means "to continue dreaming." Hmm ... okay, it's a neutral meaning ... there seems to be no bad connotation there at this very point.

But in the actual use of the phrase in the webpage, I smelled a somewhat provocative nuance... So the meaning of the phrase as a pure verb in the dictionary seems not to fit right with that usage.

Then I note another item below the verb ... it shows that, as a phrase, it is:

used to express skepticism or derision about the possibility of an interlocutor's statement

Ah, I see it. So it could be that if you suspect a hidden anagram in the title of the manga "ドラえもん," it is up to the one who interprets it whether it might have a nice (or neutral) or bad meaning.