しあわせ

A few weeks ago, we were learning the vocabulary for chapter 13 of Genki* .

One of the vocabulary words, as you can probably guess from the title, was しあわせ.  The definition in the vocabulary was long-term happiness, lasting happiness.  It is a な adjective, so I naturally thought "well, there's a word I'm never going to need, they obviously included that so that we would have to practice な adjectives more and for some variety from たのしい..."

But I learned it anyway (perhaps more from having had that internal dialogue about it ;)) & time moved on.

This Sunday, I watched the last episode of the Mobile Suit Gundam: the Witch from Mercury.  A small group of us watch the shows simultaneously, the Japanese with subtitles version, then we talk about them together in voice chat on Discord.  On Sunday, there was just the core group of 3 - me, K & T.  K has studied a little Japanese ages ago and mostly forgotten it, T can mostly get by without the subtitles, and there's me, somewhere between them (trying to remember to actually listen to the words rather than just the sounds and emotion of the speech, because when you read the subtitles, you tend to forget about your ears and that you might actually understand some of it... **).

If you haven't seen the last episode, what comes ahead, including the next footnote item, contains spoilers, so you should stop now.  A Gundam witch image to give you more space before the spoilers...

Cover of the first Blu-ray volume

Partway through, I caught the word しあわせ, and my brain instantly latched on to it and realised how very, very wrong I was to think that I would never need to use that word ever again****. After the show, when we were chatting about the episode, we had debated whether (remember, I warned you about the spoilers) they were married or not, and T said that there was a zoomed in picture of their hands & they had rings.  I commented about having caught しあわせ during the episode, and then explained to K about the enduring, long term happiness, and that a more equivalent English term might be something like "married/wedded bliss"#.

T commented then that she had forgotten that we didn't all speak Japanese and wouldn't have caught those nuances & that she was glad that I had brought it up, and then expanded on it - saying that wedded bliss is even more appropriate than I knew, because that word is part of the phrase for congratulating married couples/wishing them well for their married life together（おしあわせに！), and used by the priests blessing the marriage##.  So, anyway, they are definitely married and しあわせis definitely a term that I will remember.####

* it's the first chapter in book 2, they didn't restart the numbering for the new book, book 1 goes up to 12.

** something I realised I was doing when Sugawara sensei showed us a video after our five minute break in our Elementary 2 class and commented at the end that he is a native Japanese speaker and had realised that when he started to read the subtitles***, he had stopped listening to the spoken language in the video. 

*** Presumably double checking them for accuracy to not lead his students astray...

**** Although to need it in the last episode of a Mobile Suit Gundam story is a bit of a plot twist, to put it mildly.

# I know it isn't just used for marriages, but it's a phrasing & an emotion word that sets it aside from just regular happy, that gives it that different flavour.

## One of the example sentences for しあわせ in shirabe jisho### is しさいは、しやわせな二人の結婚をしゅくふくした。 It translates this as "the priest blesses the marriage of the happy couple."  Funnily enough, at the end of episode 23, they didn't give us the next episode title at the end, just "next time - the last episode"  When the episode started, I was surprised to see a different title on it, and worried I had loaded the wrong ep.... :D  But I'm digressing.  I mentioned the title here because it refers back to that phrasing - 目一杯の祝福を君に (Meippai no Shukufuku wo Kimi ni), which was translated as "May All Blessings Find Their Way To You, I'm Wishing It"  You might have noticed that the word しゅくふく comes up in both -"celebration of a joyous occasion, blessing, giving one's blessing, wishing (someone) good luck"

### I loved jisho.org when I first met it, but I love shirabe jisho more because it has the components of the kanji and you can drill down into them & knowing which components something has as its base really helps for drawing them - it's because of shirabe jisho that I realised that the + of this kanji component 土 isn't always from ten or earth/Turkey in radicals/parts, and although they had looked the same on jisho, they actually were not.  Sometimes, it is from a different radical entirely - the samurai one & it means that the horizontal stroke of the + part needs to be wider than the base.  I wouldn't have realised that and would be drawing the middle stroke too short without it.  It also seems to have better example sentences, clearly marked for which usage of the term they refer to.

I still love jisho, it's much better at finding the correct verb from typing a conjugated form of it (although shirabe jisho is better at actually including all the conjugations - jisho is missing the conjugation for  ある and the conjugation for です and だ do not actually link to each other.  I know copulas are weird, but they should still link the plain & polite forms.  Jisho is also better at finding phrases.

#### She also described one of the characters as けち and was frustrated because her brain had gone blank for the English word... luckily that was in chapter 14 vocab, so I was able to supply stingy/mean... another word I probably didn't expect to use very much (when would I be rude enough to be that direct and say that someone is stingy/mean?)