In today’s post, I thought it would be fun to break down this manga panel together! For the rest of December, I’m going to try to include more Christmas themed vocabulary in my Japanese study posts.
To start, let’s create a word bank so that we understand each of the words.
** For this post, you need to be able to read hiragana and katakana as I won’t be providing romaji readings**
This picture is from volume one of the manga “花野井くんと恋の病” You can check it out for yourself here!
Word Bank
- イルミネーション・lights; Christmas lights; fairy lights
- 消える・きえる・to disappear; to go out
- 機材・きざい・machinery
- トラブル・trouble
- 閉園・へいえん・a park closing; closing time for a park
- 30分・３０ぷん・30 minutes
Let’s get translating!
The first sentence is:
あれ。。。イルミネーション消えちゃった。
As this is a rather short sentence, I think we can look at it in just two chunks!
1
あれ。。。
- This word shows surprise at something. It’s similar to “oh?” in English.
We can translate it as: Oh…
2
イルミネーション消えちゃった。
- 消えちゃう is a conjugation of the verb 消える。It implies something happened unintentionally in this circumstance, and can add a bit of cuteness to a sentence.
- The ちゃう conjugation is the same as てしまう。The only difference is that ちゃう is more informal.
- 消える is an intransitive verb. This means if we want to use it in a sentence, we would use は or が, and not を。In this example, the speaker dropped the particle.
We can translate this part of the sentence as: The Christmas lights turned off.
Now, let’s take a look at the second speech bubble! This one is longer than the first, so we’ll have to break it down as well.
1
機材トラブルかな？
- 機材 means equipment or machinery.
- トラブル means the same thing in English, trouble!
- かな indicates thought or wonder. We can use it when saying our thoughts out loud.
We can translate this part of the sentence literally as: I wonder if it’s machinery troubles?
A little less literally would be: I wonder if the machinery is malfunctioning?
2
閉園まではまだあと30分あるはずだけど。
- 閉園 may look to be a tricky word, but it’s actually rather simple if we take a look at each of the Kanji characters! 閉 is the character for “closing”, and 園 is the character for “park”. Put them together, and it means “a park is closing.”
- まで means “until” in this scenario. 閉園まで can be translated as “until closing.”
- 30分ある means to have 30 minutes. Literally, it means “30 minutes exist.”
- はず is a very useful word we can stick on to the end of phrases and clauses. It implies something should be the case. As in “there should be 30 minutes left”
So, putting everything together, we can translate this sentence literally as “Until the park closes there should still be 30 minutes left…”
And that’s it! If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments below!
Maddies Manga 
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