Recently we took up the challenge of seeing how far the envelope could be pushed on learning tools for Japanese.
We’re delighted to announce real-time generation and translation of Japanese via our Composing Tool, Wag!
Now, when students are composing sentences using Wag, Wag will attempt to translate the sentence and offer a grammatical interpretation of what was said. While it is far from perfect, it’s a huge milestone in generating Japanese and seeing a real-time English translation of what you’ve placed.
We hope to keep making incredible tools to help accelerate the learning process for Japanese! Check out a small demo video below:
Every time a sentence is submitted in the composing tool Wag, Wag will do its best to auto-fit a translation. It can do fairly sophisticated phrases (including use of “ands” and “of the’s”). We hope to make it available for public use one day. Right now, it’s available to subscribers of Japanese Complete.
Example generated translations with input:
The engine behind Wag can break Japanese into meaningful pieces and rearrange it to provide an English translation. Check out some of the real-time, actual results:
Imagine if while you were learning to write in Japanese, you could verify that you were meaning what you said, and saying what you mean. That’s what Wag does for Japanese learners. The functionality still leaves much to be desired, but it’s a very promising start for phrase-based translation and creative generation tools for language learning.
Want to Learn, Don’t know Where to Start
If you’re interested in learning Japanese and don’t know where to start, we have a free guide we released a few months ago in February called Essential Japanese: The Mental Model. It has a companion page to Reverse Engineer some elementary Japanese phrases.