Sentence of the Day 6/25/09
I hope to make this a recurring post, giving a sentence from my study regimen and a detailed breakdown of it.
Today’s sentence comes from クロノトリガー (Chrono Trigger), pretty early on in the game as I’m just starting to play through it again in Japanese. This particular quote comes from a soldier in Truce Village just after traveling to 600 AD for the first time, when Chrono is still trying to figure out where he is. Notice that while there is one special term used primarily in fantasy novels and video games （魔王）, most of the terms and grammar are normal, everyday words.
Vocabulary definitions are in Japanese, and where possible come from チャレンジ小学国語辞典, which I highly recommend as a dictionary with very simply-worded J-J definitions. Widely available in Japan, but you can order it from amazon.co.jp if you’re not over there. Has furigana over every character!
Anyway, without further ado, today’s sentence:
「わが国は、いま平和をとりもどすため魔王軍と日夜戦っているのだ。」
我が わが
わたしの。自分（じぶん）の。わたしたちの。
我が implies a level of pride in your ownership.
平和 へいわ
戦争（せんとう）などがなくて、世（よ）の中（なか）がよく治（おさ）まっていること。
取り戻す とりもどす
もとの状態（じょうたい）に回復（かいふく）する。
A compound of 取（と）る and 戻（もど）す.
魔王 まおう
悪魔（あくま）の王（おう）。
Wasn’t in my elementary school dictionary, so this definition was from the much more advanced 大辞林. Luckily there was a simple definition available – essentially it means “lord of evil magic”.
軍 ぐん
兵士（へいし）の集（あつ）まり。
日夜 にちや
昼（ひる）も夜（よる）も。いつも。
I originally selected this sentence to nail down this kanji reading.
戦う たたかう
武器（ぶき）を持（も）って争（あらそ）う。戦争（せんそう）をする。
I included all of the relevant definitions for your convenience, and as a kind of exercise for myself to make sure I really know each word, but for my own review flashcard I only include the following:
Front:
わが国は、いま平和をとりもどすため魔王軍と日夜戦っているのだ。
Back:
日夜 にちや 昼（ひる）も夜（よる）も。いつも。
わが 国[くに]は、いま 平和[へいわ]をとりもどすため 魔王[まおう] 軍[ぐん]と 日夜[にちや] 戦[たたか]っているのだ。
In other words, I have all the readings, and then the definition of the only word I’m likely to have trouble with. I get the most mileage out of my flashcards when I include only one new fact per card, so I try to select sentences with that in mind.
Getting Back Into It
Welcome to 勉強中, my blog about learning Japanese. I hope to use this space for a few different purposes – to help beginner to intermediate students of Japanese structure their learning effectively, to get feedback on my own study techniques from other learners, to collect interesting links and neat Japanese websites, and to help motivate myself to keep at it.
Who Am I?
Me on top of Japan
My name is shaydwyrm, a name which has a long and illustrious history dating back to the day in elementary school when I thought I had come up with an awesome Battle.net screen name and then mangled the spelling because someone had already taken it. As you might expect from that, chief among my hobbies is video gaming, followed by (in no particular order) Go, Ultimate, Guitar, Anime, and of course Japanese language.
I am a recent MIT graduate, where I did my humanities concentration in Japanese language. This involved taking two years of language classes, which took me three years to finish on account of not being able to wake up in time for half of them. Still, repeating a year of classes really made sure I had nailed down the fundamentals, so maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing.
It wasn’t until after I graduated though that my Japanese really took off. Through a university program I found a one year internship at Merck‘s Tsukuba Research Institute (now closing, sadly :-(), and spent the summer in intense study-mode preparing to ship off to the island. Sadly, despite the college classes and my extra study, on arrival I found my Japanese to be pretty woeful. I needn’t have worried overly much though – communication was rough at times, but by the end of the year I could talk my way through pretty much any situation, and on select topics of personal interest (Go, Food, Sake) I could sound pretty fluent.
Last August I returned to the US and plunged headfirst into the failing economy. Due to a number of different factors I was unable to find work for a while, so I did what any self-respecting out-of-work video game junkie would do – I reopened my World of Warcraft account.
Fast forward almost a year hovering around zero productivity, and I’ve finally gotten back on the wagon. Suddenly swimming in free time and slightly twitchy from missing my daily raiding fix, I’ve started reopening all my dusty Japanese resources and flexing my atrophied language skills.
This blog, should I prove able to continue updating it, will follow my attempts to polish my skills at reading and understanding Japanese in all contexts. I am happy to accept any questions or comments on any post, and if I can’t help you out I will do my best to direct you to someone who can!
勉強中 