Alright, here are some of the extremely basic Japanese phrases that I think everyone should learn! Or rather, you should already know about! Dictionary meanings are all taken from jisho.org!
よろしくお願いします (Yoroshiku onegaishimasu) - Please remember me; please help me; please treat me well; I look forward to working with you.
I have been translating this as 'we ask for your favor' as well. It's a greeting/expression that you hear a lot, a lot. Maybe it's just me, but I think 'we ask for your favor' sounds so much more awkward in English. I guess it's because we don't greet people that way in English? But this phrase is on the top of my list on words that I wish to leave in Japanese.
Broken down, お願いします (onegaishimasu) just means please. It is used alone a lot. To mean things like 'please stop it', or 'please be serious', or just 'please help us/treat us well' etc etc. Like when someone screws up in VSA, and Nino goes 'onegaishimasu!', he's trying to tell that person to please stop messing up/fooling around etc... I think you can get the idea.
よろしく (宜しく, yoroshiku) on it's own has several meanings. I quote from my favorite website:
1. Well; properly; suitably.
2. Best regards; please remember me; please treat me favorably (favourably); please take care of.
3. Just like...; as though one were...
4. By all means; of course. (as よろしく…べし)
Okays, I can't really quote the meaning properly on LJ because it would look too messy, but you can check out the site yourself later on. For this phrase... I've pretty much only seen it used as no. 2. Basically the same way as yoroshiku onegaishimasu.
ありがとうございます (arigatou gozaimasu) or just ありがとう (arigatou). Aw come on, you know this one right? It just means thanks, or thank you. It's a very straight forward meaning though so I'd normally just translate this. Not that you needed the translation... :)
おはようございます (ohayo gozaimasu) or just ございます (ohayo) - good morning.
こんにちは (今日は, konnichiwa) - Hello; good day (daytime greeting)
The kanji literally means 'today is'. It used to be that they would greet each other by say 'Today is a good day' or something, but as language go, they evolve with usage, and eventually it was just shortened to 'today is'.
こんばんは (今晩は, konbanwa) - Good evening
Again, like konnichiwa, it literally means 'tonight is'.
お休みなさい (oyasuminasai) - Good night
Now, you may have noticed. What does ございます (gozaimasu) mean? Well that phrase actually can be written in kanji! It goes like this: 御座います - To be; to exist.
It's used in the polite form, so saying ohayo gozaimasu is more polite and formal than just saying ohayo.
いただきます (itadakimasu) - Expression of gratitude before meals.
Ah this! Another phrase with no English equivalent! Nor a proper Chinese equivalent either.
ごちそうさまでした (gochisousama deshita) - That was a delicious meal (said after meals); what a wonderful meal.
Gochisou literally means a feast, or a treat.
ただいま (tadaima) - I'm home
Used as an expression to announce your arrival at home. We know that Jun says this when he arrives home too. Even though he stays alone. He says he wants to practice for marriage life or something hahaha. He says oyasuminasai to himself too.
Well besides being used as a greeting, this phrase can also mean "Presently; right away; right now; just now".
おかえりなさい (okaerinasai) - Welcome home
Used as a greeting to welcome someone home. So the person who just returned will say 'tadaima', and the one at home would say 'okaerinasai' or 'okaeri' for short.
And since we are talking about Okaeri, as you know Arashi has a song with that title. Besides being a short form for Okaerinasai, it also means 'return'.
失礼します (shitsurei shimasu) - Excuse me
Well 失礼 (shitsurei) literally means you 'lost manners', i.e. impolite. As an expression it literally means 'I'm going to be rude'. It's generally used to mean 'excuse me for disturbing' or 'excuse me for the intrusion'. This is being said when you enter rooms.
おじゃまします (お邪魔します, ojyama shimasu) - Excuse me for disturbing (interrupting) you; greeting used when entering someone's home.
邪魔 (jyama) means 'Hindrance; obstacle; nuisance.' So similar to the earlier phrase it literally means 'I'm going to be a hindrance'.
いらっしゃいませ (irassaimase) - Welcome (in shops, etc.).
If you go to a Japanese restaurant, you'd hear this phrase spoken in its various levels of accuracy a lot. Well at least that's the case in my country...
おつかれさま (otsukaresama) - 1. Thank you; many thanks; much appreciated. 2. That's enough for today.
頑張って (ganbatte) - Hold on; go for it; keep at it.
Well I'm sure we all know this phrase too! It's hard to get a good English equivalent too, although the concept itself is easy enough to understand. I would translate it as 'do your best' (of course, it varies with the context too) as compared to the meanings the website gives me.
Okays. I guess I ended up with a longer list than I originally intended! But know you know the meaning of some basic phrases...! But well, earlier I mentioned jisho.org as my to-go website for checking the meaning of phrases. Let me introduce about this website a little more!
Well the full site is actually
http://beta.jisho.org/It's still in beta as the website name suggests. I have no idea how long it's gonna stay in 'beta' though, but whatever. It works perfectly fine for me and I've not encountered any problems so far.
The homepage explains exactly what the site can do already, but let me just highlight a few things.
Of course you can search Japanese words. That's a given. But the search bar let's you key in romanji too! And that is fantastic for me, because otherwise I'd have to keep switching languages while doing my translation, and my lappy isn't exactly in it's prime now, and each language switch wastes maybe... 30 seconds, 1 minute, or more if my lappy isn't happy. And more importantly it breaks my momentum. So searching in romanji = love.
I do still switch languages a lot if the translation is demanding. I type in Japanese, or if the kanji is presented and I don't know the pronunciation, but know the Chinese pronunciation, I will type in simplified or traditional Chinese. Or if I don't know the Chinese pronunciation, I might chose to write out the word (yay for handwriting support on mac, but tell me why there isn't handwriting support for Japanese? -.-'''). Or, I could choose to key in the word by radicals on the website. Or you know, the website let's you draw/write out the kanji too! (I still want native Japanese handwriting support for Mac, because I can use the trackpad directly to draw, with the website I need to use my mouse.)
This site also let's you do an English to Japanese search. It's not a translate feature though. Just a reverse search whereby they look for the English word among all the English meanings of the Japanese words that they have. This is well, useful for the times when I suspect the word they just said means something, and I try to confirm my guess by searching for the English word instead. Of course, it only works if I got the meaning spot on. If not, I'm back to straining my ears and trying out many different combinations of what they could possibly have said.
Finally. Some notes on translation.
The Japanese grammar is vastly different from English. And they way the sentences can go frustrates me sometimes. I do try at times, to conserve their way/order of speaking (particularly if they pause quite some bit in between sentences), but most of the time I just end up having to reorder stuff so that it's more fluent in English. In Japanese, a single verb like for example 'eat', can be a sentence on it's own. And that's a grammatically correct sentence. The way of phrasing the sentence is much more varied too, and I think because of that? the sentences can run way, way longer than a sentence in English can (and still make logical sense). Like Sho or Jun may have been speaking for half a minute or longer, and they are still what, on the same sentence? Whereas in my subs you would see it split into two or more sentences already. I don't know, maybe someone with better language prowess than myself could keep it all in one sentence...? But me, I can't handle it.
I can translate faster when I understand what they are saying in it's entirety, and then I can digest and write out in English my understanding... but that could lead to mistakes like 'today' and 'yesterday', because my understand of today is by 'one waking day', rather than by midnight! XD
Sometimes our boys use so many descriptive words, but when translated to English, it's not fluent and I have to drop some words. It makes me sad that... I can't faithfully replicate every single word they say, but that's the way things are with translations. Similarly, in Japanese you don't always need to have a subject to form a complete sentence, so the subject is left out many of times, and I have to fill the subject in based on my understanding of the context. At other times, I understand the meaning of the Japanese phrase/kanji, because there is a direct translation into Chinese (like, the exact same kanji means the exact same thing). Then I'll need to rack my brains for a Chinese to English translation, or I just end up searching the dictionary to see suggestions on how to translate the word. These reasons are why I am against re-translations. Much of the meaning is inevitably lost during the first translation already, you cannot fully capture the meaning anymore if you translate that further.
We had a game on forums before. Someone pastes a bunch of text in English, and they the next person uses google translate to translate it into any language of their liking, and so on and so forth. Many re-translations later we get google to translate it back to English for us and we all have a good laugh and how little of the original meaning is left (if any at all!). Sure machine translators are still no where as good as human translators, but there are some intricacies in languages that varies with each language. Like I am told (and from my very little knowledge of the language) in French, there's a feminine and masculine aspect to each word, which is not available in English. So just translating a simple sentence from English to French, you'll need to fill in the gender information if it is not present in the English sentence. Similarly, there are a lot of such nuances that needs to be filled when translating from Japanese to English.
Right! So that's my really long explanation on translations! I'm not an expert on translations or languages, so I hope I didn't make too many mistakes in my little explanations! Yoroshiku onegaishimasu!
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