罗汉伦

I have a new service that sends out a new Chinese word of the day: http://cn.robrohan.com. One of the words today was 弄 (nòng, “mess with; handle; fool with; do; manage; fix; play with; toy with”).

When I get one of these new words I try to use it in a sentence to help me remember the word, and also to help with me with my sentences (at which I am not very good). To check my work I use Google translate, and a Mac OS X only widget.

While both of these items are great pieces of software, and I love using them, online translators in general seem not to work very well.

For example, my test sentence (which may be wrong): “我弄这个电脑。”. I would expect that to translate to something like “I mess with this computer”, or “I toy with this computer”. However on google I get:

I get the computer.

and on my widget I get

I make this computer.

Both do not seem correct to me, and I have a hard time figuring out if my sentance is bad, or the service is bad. Sigh… someday…