Translation Strategy

[flatuniverse]

は --> the element before it is the theme of the sentence. Often this is the doer (subject).
を --> the element before it is the person/thing affected by the action (direct object).

• knowing how verbs look like and where they are placed in sentences

それで,  英雄神 マルドウク は 　海の女神  チアマトと   彼女が    生んだ　 １１種の竜を　 相手に　 たった 一人で    戦いを挑みました。

戦いを挑みました -->  The main verb is generally placed at the end of a sentence. The bit marked in red is a characteristic verb ending; these endings will also help you spot the verbs.

• knowing how nouns (= words referring to people, animals or things like "Mary" or "dog") look like

それで,  英雄神 マルドウク は 　海の女神  チアマトと   彼女が    生んだ　 １１種の竜を　 相手に　 たった 一人で    戦いを挑みました。

英雄神, 海の女神,  竜    --> I only marked the most important nouns referring to the doer (subject) and the people/things affected by the action (direct objects). If you want to spot the nouns in a sentence you have to look for the Chinese characters (Kanji).

Now, if we look closely, we'll see that the basic pattern of our sentence seems to be:
noun   は    noun 　を  verb.

Once we've found this pattern, we can look up unknown words in a dictionary and fill this pattern with meaning.

Here is a simplified version of our sentence:

それで, 英雄神 は 海の女神 を 戦いを挑みました。

If you look up the words, you come up with--->

それで = thereupon
英雄神 は = the highest god (subject)
海の女神 を = the sea goddess (object)
戦いを挑みました。= challenged to fight (verb)

So, the meaning of the sentence is something like:

Thereupon, the highest god challenged the sea goddess to fight (against him).

That wasn't really all that difficult, right??

Ok, so now all you'll have to do is learn:

- all about grammatical particles
- how verbs, nouns and adjectives look like and how to spot them in a sentence
- Japanese characters (at least some of them...)
- how to look up words in a dictionary
- and probably a whole lot of other things I forgot to mention...^^