I'm still new at this and don't understand all the characters in this sentence...need to know what it says so i can respond to a message someone sent me on Lang-8.

我可以问一下你现在的工作是什么吗？忙不忙的啊？

Any help is much appreciated.

May I ask where you work? Are you busy?

Can I ask what work you do? Are things busy?

^^The latter!

The latter.

if it is just a character problem,

http://pin1yin1.com/ and others like it are good for practicing reading quick sentences, etc. with both the pinyin and some meaning given to you.

(assuming you don't have peraperakun or other plugin for firefox, or are on chrome :( )

Thanks for the translations guys, I was pretty close when I tried to do it myself (go me! :D) I've sent my potentially nonsensical response back...

I used to have peraperakun installed, but then something happened and now it refuses to install or update :/

Thanks Hobbes828, I love it!

@RyuuguuAzuma:

If you're looking for a PeraPeraKun replacement, I highly recommend the Lingoes dictionary. It's a free pop-up dictionary program (works in any program, not just your browser) and you can download any language you want from their dictionary database. I haven't had much success with PeraPeraKun since the major update awhile back, so I've been using Lingoes exclusively. It's at http://www.lingoes.net/.

I like it because it's also good for getting translations of program menus (I have several programs that only have a Chinese UI), and you can translate from any language into any language. Takes a little time to understand the features, but totally awesome for a free app.

Have just downloaded it lingoes, will put it through its paces later. Thanks for the suggestion!

我可以问一下你现在的工作是什么吗？忙不忙的啊？

1) May I ask where you work? Are you busy?
2) Can I ask what work you do? Are things busy?

I already understand the words, but am not sure I would have translated it correctly, why is it "Are things busy" instead of "Are you busy"? The 的 implies the work is busy instead of the person is busy?

@xkfowboa: That's why learning words and characters isn't enough... ;(

Yeah I would say that the 的 implies it is the work / a more general busyness to go along with the job. Plus, "Are you busy?" in English, to me, is more about right now instead of a continuing state (technically I'm not sure that it has to mean this), so I would think in chinese it would be more of a "你忙不忙" or 你在忙吗？ or something like that. of course the Chinese also seem to have a lot of special meanings/phrases they can use with 忙 and working so I wouldn't pretend to know very well what all it could mean, :)

I agree with Hobbes828 on "Are you busy" being about right now. I've been trying to figure out the 的 and what it refers to, as it also seemed a bit strange to me. The 忙 I think refers to 你现在的工作 rather than 你. I asked a teacher about the 忙不忙的啊 and she said that it's nonstandard, normally you'd use 忙不忙 or 忙不忙啊. Apparently 南方人 like to add a 的 after adjectives, she guessed that whoever wrote that sentence was from south China. Maybe RyuuguuAzuma can tell us where the sentence's author is from?

The usage of 的 is rather complicated, my grammar book has 6 or 7 different entries.

About pop-up translators for browsers etc. The global apps like Lingoes don't work with Chrome. Hobbes828 implies there's no extension for Chrome to do the same as PeraperaKun or Mandarin Popup et al.

In fact there is, it's simply called Zhongwen and it was released a couple of days ago. It works nicely. Unfortunately it has tone colours enabled permanently and they're the ones Skritter uses - so if you use something else it's a bit annoying.

But hey, it's a pop up annotator for Chrome. At last.

Awesome! I needed this. Thanks for the tip, Lurks.

@Lurks. I did imply that, but if I could I would unimply? it :)

I also found Zhongwen through chinese-forums yesterday. Yay for pop-up dictionary in Chrome!