My dad loves anime, so he tried to learn Japanese when I was very young. I wanted to be included despite being under 10 years old (can't remember my exact age), so he tried to have us learn together. Eventually we got bored and gave up due to poor executive dysfunction (we both have ADHD.)

Due to a combination of gaining an interest in UTAU and wanting to become bilingual, I'm attempting again at learning. I've been trying to learn in my free time for quite a while now, and in that time I've learned that websites like Google Translate and Duolingo are nowhere near good. Like. I knew that Google Translate wasn't very good, but I didn't realize it was that bad. And I used Duolingo until I found posts online about how unsuited for Japanese it is. I'm trying to use Romajidesu and Lingodeer instead.

A common exercise I do to practice is find a Japanese song I like, load up each line in Romajidesu, and try to translate it based on a combination of the autotranslation, that line on the translation page that lists definitions, and prior knowledge of the language.

It feels like it helps me a lot, but I'm worried that it isn't actually helping, because what if Romajidesu is as bad as Google Translate?

Here's an example, of the first 5 lines of the song S.I.U. by MARETU.

The original lyrics are: 愛らしく 哀しく躓くあなたから 匂い立つ死の艱苦 慎ましく、つましくぬかずく あなたには 申し訳ない言い訳 そもそも創めは投げやり

What the translator gave me was: From you who are adorable and sad The smell of death Humble and frustrating for you Sorry, excuse In the first place creation is throwing

What I came up with based on breaking down the lyrics and trying to make sense of them was: For you my dear, an adorable and sad person The smell of death Is humble and frustrating. Sorry, excuse me But you were already injured.

I'm mainly worried because the 5th line is far off from what Romajidesu came up with. Am I just being paranoid, or is Romajidesu not good for this?

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    It’s a fairly low quality website… they reused some freely available resources, most of which you should be able to access in better, more up-to-date versions on jisho.org. I’m a little biased against them as well, as when they put up their website they tried to post a bunch of answers here promoting it, but the answers were of low quality and didn’t help anyone :-( – snailplane Dec 12 '19 at 16:31
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    I'm going to move your question to meta, since it's a discussion about resources. – snailplane Dec 12 '19 at 17:08

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