自分 じぶん　oneself
死　　し　　　　death
真剣　しんけん　earnest (i don’t know if this is the right translation in German it is ernst, ernsthaft)

I don’t know how 考えた is readed. also I don’t know how to translate ざまなんか. I think the sentence means something like “I have never thought about my own death in an earnest (? as I said with ernst, ernsthaft in German is it allright) way.”

Hope you can help me. Thanks.

The dictionary at jisho.org does a fairly good job of deconjugating verbs. It will tell you the dictionary form and reading.

http://jisho.org/words?jap=%E8%80%83%E3%81%88%E3%82%8B&origin=%E8%80%83%E3%81%88%E3%81%9F&eng=&dict=edict

You might also try getting an audiobook in Japanese.

> also I don’t know how to translate ざまなんか.

I think that breaks up as ざま　なんか, but I think the usage is probably idiomatic. For ざま, take a look at the dictionary on goo.ne, which often does a good job of providing examples.

http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/leaf/je2/29398/m0u/%E3%81%96%E3%81%BE/

In this case those examples aren’t really on point. Next try Eijiro, which is often useful for tracking down idiomatic phrases. The trick is what to look up. Sometimes you have to guess a few times before getting something that returns good results. In this case a search which does the trick is にざま, which tells you about the idiom 死にざま:

http://eow.alc.co.jp/%E3%81%AB%E3%81%96%E3%81%BE/UTF-8/

Short words in hiragana are usually difficult to research, because you get too many false matches, and besides that they often mean lots of different things. So you have to be clever with your searches. If I were doing this, I would just do some quick research, and if that doesn’t work out, just make a note of the word and where you saw it. Read the original English version to make sure you understand what the sentence means, and move on. The next time you see the word, it may become clearer how it is being used.

Good luck!

(I) didn’t seriously consider the circumstances of something like my own death. (or one’s own death)

I actually checked the official English translation to check if I was right and that’s basically what it is. (The topic of the translation being “correct” isn’t worth talking about as they often fudge the meaning to make it more readable).

Well this was a challenge! Its hard to put into English because I don’t clearly understand it, and it seems 死にざま is not a standard word at all and I had to refer to this site in Japanese for an explanation. http://www.geocities.jp/shinmeiker/2003/shinizama.htm

Oh and by the way.

考える （かんがえる） – to consider, to think about.

ざま as a suffix means the ‘way’ or ‘manner’ of it. So 死にざま is literally the ‘manner of death’ or ‘kind of death’. It is　like 死に方.

なんか is the colloquial form of など　and means ‘things like’. To quote the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar: “It is used as nado is used except that in a context conveying undesirability or contempt there is more emphasis on the derogatory meaning.”

EDIT: yeah I noticed that earlier after I had already looked it up, but it was a good exercise as I researched Japanese resources which is always the best way I think lol. On なんか I’m not sure if theres a large difference between なんか and なんて

Oh and Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar is a god send.

There are two なんて’s and one does indeed have that usage. The other is the colloquial of なんと. Both are covered in the Advanced grammar dictionary, which doesn’t only contain advanced grammar but also things that were missed when they wrote the first two dictionaries.

And yeah, I hadn’t actually come across 死に様 before either. Though it’s in both the Kenkyusha and Edict dictionaries.