You can actually watch the show on Cruncyroll if you want to, but I’ve included today’s famous line in the YouTube video below: This was originally a manga, but I think that in America at least, the anime is more widely known. The name of it is Fist of the North Star in English, and 北斗の拳 (hokuto no ken) in Japanese. Which anime you might ask? Well, it is a rather old one that came out in the mid-eighties. I’ve said it a couple of times, but this line comes from an anime. Where Does the Line Come From Originally? In English, we like to be pretty explicit and state these kinds of things, but in Japanese the situation extrapolates this short addition to the phrase.Īnyway, this wasn’t really necessary to go over, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless. Since the people who get hit by the hero’s special move are still alive and moving, but about to experience a horrible death no matter what they do, the もう let’s them know something about themselves that they have not yet realized. I’ll go over those details in the next section, but for now let’s focus on that “You don’t even know” part that isn’t explicitly stated in the Japanese dialog.īasically speaking, it comes back to that that もう from earlier which is used to express a change in state. In this case, the phrase is used by the protagonist of the anime when he uses a special move on the bad guys, and they are “dead men walking,” so to speak. The thing about it is that the Japanese language relies pretty heavily on context to explain certain things. Sometimes you will see that English translation of this phrase as “You don’t even know that you are already dead” instead of the one that I’ve explained above.Īnd the cool thing is that this too is correct! Let’s talk about this next thing: An Alternative Interpretation of the Phrase Anyway, that covers all of the individual words that make up the phrase. You know how a person is “in the state of a run” when they are “running”? It’s kind of like that. 死んでいる doesn’t mean “dying” so much as it means “you are in the state of being dead.” This is one situation where a literal translation into English falls short of the true Japanese meaning. Here’s the thing about this last word: 死ぬ is literally the the verb for “to die” and here it’s in its te-form of 死んで combined with the iru-verb いる which functions like the -ing ending in English. Hence, the usage of もう in the sentence.įinally, we have 死んでいる (shinde iru) which means someone is “dead” in English. In this case, the other person was in the state of being alive, but now they are in the state of being dead. Simply put, the word もう is used when something was in one state of being, but is now in a different state of being.
Then we get もう (mou) which gets translated as “already” here, but actually has some interesting connotations in the Japanese language. The particle は (wa) follows next, and really just lets us know who the topic of the sentence is. That being said, it makes perfect sense why it’s used in anime when talking to one’s enemy. In other words, you probably shouldn’t use this when talking to a real person. Since this word is pretty rough, it is really only ever used by men in shows, or by women that have that “rough edge” to their personality. It is a lot more common to use the other person’s last name when speaking Japanese, in place of the pronoun “you” but anime tends to break this rule of decency and instead use お前. Now the first word used is お前 (omae) which is kind of a vulgar way to say “you” in Japanese. The phrase omae wa mou shindeiru is spelled in Japanese as:Īnd in English it means “You are already dead.” Then I’ll dive into each word so that you can see the individual pieces that are used to construct this iconic saying.įinally, I’d like to touch on an alternate English translation that sometimes gets used, and the reasoning behind it. 5) What do You Think? What Does the Phrase Mean?Īlright, so what I would like to do first is give the phrase in its entirety (in Japanese) along with the common English translation.
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