Quote:
Originally Posted by YuriTokoro
Hi.
Could someone correct my English?
What “Freeter” Is.
If you write the Japanese word フリーター in English, it would be “freeter”, or a person who works part-time.
Once one of my English teachers asked me what “freeter” was.
I wasn’t able to explain then because it’s really complicated.
Let me try it here.
Freeter is a shortened version of “freearbeiter”.
As you can tell, “free” is from the English word “free”, and “arbeit” is from a German word “arbeiten” (work).
Then, the last part “er” is the English way to make nouns from verbs. For example, play and player.
Arbeiten is pronounced arubaito in Japanese, which means part time job(s). The origin is that medical students used to say they “arbeiten” when they cut corpses to study human bodies. They meant it was a hard work. Japanese medical students studied the German language because early Japanese medical information was written in German. This word has spread and changed meaning into "part time job".
Anyway, “arbeiter” means “part time worker” here.
You know, there is a problem. Does “a free part time worker” work without salary? Unfortunately, no.
In this context, “free” here means “not permanent position”.
Many young people can’t get permanent positions recently and they become freeters. You might think “free” implies fun, but these people have instability. They can earn little.
This is a big problem in Japan. I guess your country might be so, too.
Thank you.
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Most of the revisions were to verb tenses to read smoother and place actions in a proper time frame ("was" instead of "is"), or removing verbs at the end of sentences where possible. The majority of the post was very well written and provided a great amount of information on a difficult subject.
Excellent post, Yuri!
