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
- 今日・きょう・today
- ありがとう・thank you
- 新鮮・しんせん・fresh
- ばっかり・only, nothing but
- 楽しい・たのしい・fun
Let’s get translating!
The first sentence is:
今日はありがとうね！
As this is a rather short sentence, I think we can look at it all together!
1
今日はありがとうね！
- As we know that 今日 means today, and ありがとう means thank you, there isn’t all that much guesswork needed to understand this sentence.
While if we were to look at it literally, we could translate it as: “Today is thank you!“, which wouldn’t make much sense! If we want to change it into proper English, we can translate it as “Thank you for today!”
“今日はありがとう”, and “昨日はありがとう”, etc. is commonly used in Japanese
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 a little bit.
The second sentence is:
新鮮なことばっかりで楽しかった！
1
新鮮なことばっかり
- 新鮮 is a な adjective, so when we use it to describe a noun, we have to include the な.
- こと in this scenario means “things.”
- ばっかり means “nothing but”, or “only.”
We can translate this part of the sentence as “nothing but fresh things” or “only fresh things.”
2
で楽しかった!
- The で here is used to connect the previous clause with the rest of the sentence.
- 楽しかった is the past tense form of 楽しい, which means to have fun.
This part of the sentence can be translated as “and it was fun!”
Putting 1 and 2 together, we can translate the full sentence as “There were only fresh things, and it was fun!”
We can translate it a little less literally, and a little more atmospherically as “Today was full of nothing but fresh things, it was fun!”
And that’s it! If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments below!
Maddies Manga 
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