You have mail!

Thank you ladybirdsleeps and marikochan for your postcards!

I was rather pleased with myself for understanding nearly everything marikochan wrote in Japanese, too :)

私も日本へ行きたいですよ。でも単語が足りないと思います。

Emergency multilingual phrasebook

(From scribot_feed; cross-posted to linguaphiles)

An interesting emergency multilingual phrasebook available as PDF files:

The Emergency Multilingual phrasebook, produced and updated by the British Red Cross Society with advice and funding from the Department of Health and endorsed by the British Association for Emergency Medicine (BAEM) is translated into 36 languages. It covers the most common medical questions and terms to help first contact staff communicate with patients who do not speak English and make an initial assessment while an interpreter is contacted

The Japanese uses a couple too many kanji for my taste—for example, they always use 何時 to translate "when", which I always want to read "nanji" and interpret as "at what hour" rather than reading it "itsu" and interpreting it as generic "when" (which can include a date).

They also have a 何ら in one place, which isn't a word I've come across. EDICT has readings "nanira" and "nanra" for it but I wonder whether they meant 幾ら "ikura" (which I would have written in kana, probably).

I was also interested by their translation of "I have to XYZ", which seems to be "Please cause XYZ to happen" (XYZをさせて下さい).