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anrakushi (Offline)
草上之风必偃
 
Posts: 474
Join Date: Dec 2007
01-27-2008, 06:13 AM

Quote:
Originally Posted by Amnell View Post
Okay, I have a better question, now:

In trying to translate a graphic I found online that contains Japanese writing, I found that 愛 ai (love) comes in a few different packages.

First, "ai" isn't the only reading for 愛 . That being beside the point, however, the problem I'm having is it's usage as a verb. The word on the graphic is を愛しています wo aishiteimasu. My problem is that I can't find any indication as to whether it's "aishite imasu" or "aishiteimasu". This is also what googletranslate spits out if you put in "to love" as your query, where "love" gets you 愛です, which doesn't quite fit with what I know of how Japanese verbs conjugate (which is limited).

The other bit I'm having trouble with is a kanji compound: 子猫. I tried looking up the compound, but got nothing. All I know is that the first means child and the second means cat.

I'm sure someone will want to see the whole sentence?

私は子猫を愛しています。

At first glance, it looks like there are some ungrammatical elements... But I can't know until I can translate it :P .
愛する is the verb, to love. without going into detailed information about grammar basically to be doing something either habitually or at that moment the verb is in て form and いる is added to that. simple example:
食べる - to eat and 食べている - to be eating

so your 愛しています is the 丁寧語 (polite form) of 愛している so it bascially means 'to be loving' or if you like to be in the action of loving someone/something but in english we simply say to love. so then putting this together with your full sentence

私は子猫を愛しています - I love kittens/i love the kitten

子猫 - koneko - means a kitten, child cat.


As for the names thing, there is no problem with having your name written in Kanji however i suggest you do so by phonetical spelling of your name. using a pseudonym, as MMM said, would be pretty damn strange.

Last edited by anrakushi : 01-27-2008 at 06:20 AM.
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