Mryntu

Learning the time of day I found that 朝 or あさ means morning, 昼 or ひる means afternoon, and 晚 I expected to be night but Google translate is saying it's moth for some reason. Does this 晚 only mean night when paired with certain characters?

Google Translate, and indeed just about any machine translation engine, is still often shit for the Japanese ↔ English language pair. Do not rely on Google Translate to learn another language, especially when looking at a single word.

Here are some time-of-day terms:

• 朝【あさ】 = "morning"


• 昼【ひる】 = "day, afternoon"


• 晩【ばん】 = "evening"


• 夜【よる】 = "late evening, night"

See also this recent post: What's the difference among 夜中, 真夜中 and 夜?

PS: For what it's worth, the actual word for "moth" is 蛾【が】. I recommend that you use any of various online dictionaries when exploring a single word. Here are some freebies:

• Weblio Japanese ↔ English


• 
  Kotobank (geared for native Japanese readers, but still offering some Japanese ↔ English content)


• 
  Jisho.org (sometimes a bit dodgy, make sure to cross-check)


• 
  Wiktionary (full disclosure: I've helped edit a lot of the Japanese entries)

Digression, and example of the perils of machine translation

The original post included the kanji 晚, technically Unicode codepoint 665A.

The above is the 旧【きゅう】字【じ】体【たい】 or "old form" of the 新【しん】字【じ】体【たい】 or "new form" kanji 晩, technically Unicode codepoint 6669.

Google Translate (mostly) correctly translates the shinjitai kanji as "night".

However, even though the kyūjitai character has the same meaning, Google mistranslates this as "moth" if the source language is set to Japanese.

When auto-detected, Google [on my machine, anyway] identifies this as Chinese and translates it as "late".

Truly, caveat usuarius.