Something that you hear a lot in Magic Users Club (which I'm rewatching for the first time in a long time) is Jibun no shinjite. They translate that as "Believe in yourself".

I think that's a colloquial translation, but it doesn't appear exact. jibun is the reflexive pronoun, meaning all of myself-yourself-herself-himself-themselves-ourselves. Context makes clear who it refers to. no is the possessive particle. As to shinjite, it looks like it's the gerundive of the verb shinjiru "to believe / to have faith in / to place trust in". A gerundive is a noun created from a verb. In "we went for a walk", walk is a gerundive. This page says that the -te form is the gerundive.

So jibun no shinjite is a sentence without a verb. It means "faith in yourself" (since it's usually someone else saying it to Sae when she clutches in critical situations). It's common in Japanese to leave things out if they can be deduced from context, and in this case I gather that the full sentence that is implied is something along the lines of "faith in yourself is what's important now", at least in context.

Have I got that right?

UPDATE: No, I have not got that right. Well, I post these because I'm trying to learn.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 05:48 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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