Oare, thank you, that explanation was useful for me. Your example of "これは俺のだ" bothering you back when you were an intermediate learner is funny because sentences like that give me fits. (I assume that is just "that one is mine"). There's a line in the opening for Tiger Mask W (I like wrestling and anime dammit) that's "虎になるのだ" and while I know it's something like "become a tiger" the "のだ" messes me up.
Oh, it was even worse than that. I was a complete beginner back then, that sentence was in a flimsy "learn Japanese in 40 lessons" book. I had no clue about the language whatsoever.
Save for hiragana and katakana which is the first thing I taught myself thinking it could come in handy.
"At least, I won't be completely illiterate", I thought. And oh boy, was I wrong. I remember myself sitting in a car with a guy who had come to pick me up at the airport, slowly driving away from Narita. Back then even in the suburbs of Chiba, where I lived for a year, a lot of road signs tended to have fewer and fewer alphabet transcriptions the farther you got from the city. Mid-drive, I thought to myself "fuck, I'm illiterate after all" I asked the dude who was driving how long it had taken him to learn all the kanji. To which he replied with a smile: "I've been here for ten years, and I still don't really know any".
In retrospect, that's what sparked my learning craze in the following years.
Oh and by the way, you are right about that のだ, your sentence could be translated into "become a tiger". It has the nuance of "you must". "(You must) become a tiger".
Depending on the context, say you have a character on his knees and the fainting memory of his dear master appears in his mind to kick him back up, for example, it could also be translated into something to the effect of "(stop whining,) be a tiger".
It's a one-way form of imperative which doesn't take into account the other person's state of mind.
It can set a sort of "hierarchy" in a series of commands.
For example:
頑張れ！立ち上がるんだ！
立ち上がれ！頑張るんだ！
are both basically the same, but the emphasis is on the second one which carries the のだ form.
I definitely get where you're coming from. Moreso than with similar languages to your own (be it French, English or Spanish), there are different knowledge thresholds and walls you're gonna hit your head against. I never got past a certain point because of that - and because I lacked motivation, to be honest.
Tell me about it! Coming from Europe, and being the young man I was (I was 22 years old), I naively thought "if people can pick up a decent level of Spanish by simply staying in Spain for 6 months, one year should be plenty of time for me to be proficient in Japanese!"
After a year, I found myself at a level where I was able to do some basic conversation, but I knew I'd forget everything in a matter of months if I went back home. So I decided to stay one more year. Six months later, I was plateauing hard so I decided to switch my full-time job into a part-time, and went to school. Probably one of the best decisions of my life (since I still live in Japan...)
Which brings me back to the motivation bit you're mentioning. I can't speak from experience on your situation, but keeping a steady pace of study, especially with a language like Japanese, seems extremely hard unless you live in the country. In that regard, I was lucky; being able to speak the language was a matter of independence, and I wanted to be independent. A lot of Japanese learners want to do it for hobby-related reasons, which makes it all the more difficult. Hobbies aren't supposed to be a chore, and God knows learning Japanese can be one at times.
However, I have witnessed a guy, a good friend of mine, who did all his Japanese learning alone in France, and still managed to trounce the JLPT 1 on his first try just a year after he began living here. So with hard work, it's definitely feasible.
My advice would be to basically forget everything you were taught in school about learning foreign languages. If you were brought up in France, you were probably served the exact same crap as I was when learning English, German and Latin: "never use a dictionary, when you don't understand a word, try to infer its meaning from context".
That dogma I had been countless times force-fed in school became my biggest hurdle when I was upper-intermediate, and it took me a very long time before I was able to pinpoint it as the culprit. Even after I got the JLPT 1.
The problem with Japanese is that trying to infer from context often doesn't work; sometimes you find yourself faced with an idiom where you're supposed to know all the words, but when you try to infer, you end up with something that makes no sense. So you start binding the grammar until all your words fit, not knowing you're actually way off.
During that period, I felt a huge loss of motivation. The fact that a lot of times, the core elements of a misunderstood sentence lie in particles and their specific uses in expressions didn't help, because it was all "stuff I knew". My advice under such circumstances would be to get back to grammar. Translate the sentence as literally as possible, properly respecting every single word's grammatical role and taking great care not to bind anything Don't ignore any も, any は, nor anything else. Just translated them as faithfully as you can.
If the sentence doesn't make sense at that point, there's something you're not understanding. It might seem like you do because you know the words separately, but you're missing something, and you've always been missing it. So it's time to learn it.
Once I started doing this, my motivation went back through the roof, because it ended the guessing game for good.
As a side note, I've served as an examiner for translation positions with a couple of companies; and interestingly, rejected French candidates always made the same mistakes at the exact same spots. And every single time, it boiled down to an approach of grammar that was too loose. So there is definitely a problem when it comes to how languages are taught in France - and I guess those become a lot more prominent with language where there's little common-ground, such as Japanese.
Honestly, I wouldn't hire the man I was when I actually began doing this job.
I'm surprised to hear you say translation and interpretation are a dead end. I mean, translation I can see, but interpretation can be very profitable, can't it?
It can be quite profitable indeed, but with French, there is a sore lack of demand. Also, there are fewer people able to work as interpreters, especially for very specialized topics. So sometimes you get called for stuff you have no clue about. A couple of months ago, I got an offer for a gig with scientists who worked in coral research.
I can't say I'm familiar with this topic besides a couples very basic things, so doing the gig would have required me to go through a self-imposed coral 101 crash course in both Japanese and French. It would have required a few days of work ahead for a sub-par result. I had already plenty of work to do in that period, so I had to let it go.
There's a reason interpreting is expensive. It's not the days you're actually on the frontline that count. It's all the work you do ahead if you're a decent professional.
Obviously, sometimes you get sweet deals. I got to go to remote islands I would never have been to, all fees paid, and received a nice amount of money for gigs that required just about a day of preparation. But these aren't legion, unless you have a good niche like sports.
The other problem is that the field is swarming with bozos who have no work ethics whatsoever, and show up with no preparation at all thinking they're going to nail it. Since they don't do any preparation, they're able to undercut your fees and thus get the job while making a large margin compared to the work they actually provide. Working for even less is not an option. Take a two days job with two days of prep time, you work a total of four days for JPY100,000. It's not a bad deal, but it becomes a lot less attractive when you have to compete with guys who'll do it for half of that simply because they just get rid of all the upstream work. Worse, even: they actually get the same amount of money as you do, since you both cash in at 25,000 a day. If you were to try and undercut them, you'd fare less than half of that. So unless you're in dire need, you just pass. And they get to add that line on their resume, regardless of how shitty their work was.
It's the same with translation, although it's actually easier to fight in that specific field. In both interpretation and translation, fees are pretty standardized. With interpretation, the only difference in quality besides the actual knowledge of the language is the amount of preparation. Translation is more on the go. Of course, a good translator will do a lot more work because he'll do research while a bad one will just skip through almost everything, thinking he understands things he in fact doesn't. But at the end of the day, the ratio will never be 2:1, so it's a lot more sustainable.
Then again, machine-translation is making a lot of progress and is coming hard at us
Je suis francophone aussi au fait. Serais-tu toi aussi un produit de l'INALCO ?
Comme tu le vois, non ;D Tu es allé jusqu'où, dans les diplômes ?
