Tatoeba Project

Dec 23, 2011 23:25

I just found this pretty neat site where you can search for words in all kinds of languages and then see translations of sentences with them in, also in several languages ( Read more... )

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Comments 6

mayurasan December 24 2011, 01:43:38 UTC
Wow, this is a really cool site! It would be really useful for students.

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gemini_artemis December 24 2011, 01:49:19 UTC
Yep! All too often, I look up a word but don't really get what exactly it means or how it's supposed to be used unless there are sentence examples with English translations. These aren't always available, though. D: I'm hoping this site will help me in that regard.

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arrowwhiskers December 24 2011, 04:45:31 UTC
Wow, this is an awesome concept! I'm a little disappointed that I'm not getting any hits for what I search, though maybe I'm being a little obscure. >> I like that it searches groups of words, though, not just THIS EXACT SENTENCE, because I feel like you can have many similar sentences that tell you the same information.

But yeah. I think context is super undervalued when learning vocabulary. Not that it's always practical or desirable to learn words purely in sentences, but it's nice to have the the resource available.

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gemini_artemis December 24 2011, 13:21:17 UTC
I'm curious now. Might I know what sentence you're looking for?

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arrowwhiskers December 25 2011, 07:04:27 UTC
There were a few I tried, but embarrassingly enough I can't remember any except one. 0w0

The one I remember is "Cats can retract their claws", from English to Spanish. I learned one way to say "retract" in that context yesterday--"meter", which is a general word for "put" (similar in Portuguese I think?), so I wanted to see if that's what would come out if I put the whole sentence.

The others were more random/I just made them up, which is probably why I don't remember.

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gemini_artemis December 26 2011, 03:55:01 UTC
Hmm, yeah, I found that sentence in German, Japanese, French, and Dutch, but I guess they don't have many Spanish entries yet. XD

I don't know about Spanish, but "meter" in Portuguese would usually require some kind of complement in that context, like "meter para dentro". Then again, "meter" doesn't sound like a very polite word in Portuguese (it's not a swearword or anything; it just doesn't sound very elegant), so we're more likely to use "colocar" instead. You know, I had a cat for many years, and yet I can't remember how we actually said that sentence in Portuguese... XD;;

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