How Much Japanese Does Admin Know?

There's probably a lot of confusion about my level of Japanese comprehension since I use Whisper AI in my workflow and I want to be completely transparent.

• I am NOT professionally certified in Japanese.
• I am NOT a native Japanese speaker.
• I AM learning Japanese.
• I AM a native American English speaker.
• I CAN read Hiragana and a bit of Kanji (still learning Katakana).
• I CAN write Kanji in mostly correct stroke order (I took a year of Mandarin in college).

The majority of my Japanese comprehension comes from:

• Watching a lot of anime (since 2002).
• Reading a lot of Japanese visual novels with voices (since 2005).
• Playing a lot of Japanese adult games (RIP Illusion).
• Watching a lot of JAV.

And a lot of the tools I use include:

• Kanji recognition dictionary
• Kanji dictionary
• Papago / DeepL / Google Translate
• Whisper AI

So if you were to give me a random JAV title and asked me to translate it without any tools, I would be able to translate roughly 10% of it. I understand some common phrases and expressions, but that's about it. I don't fully understand grammar, verb conjugation, and other miscellaneous parts of a sentence structure yet.

This is why I say Whisper AI is a complete game changer. I can translate 80% of it and then brute force the last 10%.

How I brute force the last 10%.

What do I mean by brute force? Sometimes, Whisper will hear Japanese differently than I do.

There's a scene in PRED-388 where the main guy's mother asks the main girl where she is going.

Contextually makes no sense
because if the two families are close
wouldn't the main guy's mom already know the answer?

Whisper heard this phrase as "進行量がどこいくの?" (shin'kōryōga dokoikuno) which roughly translates to "Where is the progress?" This line on its own makes no sense, but later in the scene, the actress responds with "Hawaii."

So is the progress in Hawaii? No. The JAV title centers around a wedding, and Hawaii is a popular tourist destination, especially for Japanese people. So, I assumed the actual word was honeymoon.

And I was correct!

This is what I mean by "brute forcing" and "manually quality checking" Whisper AI's output. I don't blame Whisper for hearing it incorrectly, but I also know that in the context of the scene, asking "where is the progress" is complete nonsense.

Yes, I'm not fluent in Japanese, but to make up for it, I spend a lot of time and attention on these little details so it makes sense to me and to other viewers.

As you can see, AI levels the playing field. I am pretty much on par with the low wage Japanese translators that work on Crunchyroll.

Actual image of professional translation at work.

No, I'm not fluent in Japanese, but I make sure I know every minute and every second of each title I work on.