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MMM (Offline)
JF Ossan
 
Posts: 12,200
Join Date: Jun 2007
06-08-2009, 07:50 AM

I understand your feelings, Odin, and if I wasn't sure that these were not the words of a Japanese native, I wouldn't have posted anything.

Having seen a couple members over the last year or so try and pass themselves off as something they weren't (one went so far as to post pictures he or she found online) much to the shock of the members who thought they had made a new friend online, I feel it is my duty to do what I can to expose potential fraud the moment I see it.

In short, people come here looking for Japanese friends. How big a disappointment would it be to find your new friend is not Japanese at all, or that your new tutor is not a native speaker?

If I am wrong I will be the first to apologize and retract my statements, but even a four-year-old knows not to use ある when talking about his relatives, much less any living thing.

私はアメリカに住んでいる親戚があります
I have relatives who live in America.


Of course a machine translator wouldn't make that distinction.

A three-year-old would make the distinction between the Japanese language and Japanese citizenship, and would never call themselves 日本語, but this 14-year-old states:

私は日本語が、
I am Japanese,


Naturally a machine translator wouldn't know which "Japanese" was intended.

In fact not just any machine translator, but iGoogle translator was used for the machine translation of every phrase this "Japanese" person presented.

Go ahead and copy-paste any English sentence from the OP into this site and see the results for yourself:

iGoogle
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