自分: Referring to oneself using oneself!

Introduction

After your encounter with the deep-sea leviathan of 尊敬語そんけいご, I figured it would be nice to have a short and easy lesson! So today we're going to talk about ourselves! That's never scary or difficult, right?

自分じぶん: Not just a word, a person

自分じぶん is sort of a funny word: it can be used to refer to ourselves, to talk about someone's experiences from their viewpoint, as a second-person pronoun, or even as a first-person pronoun!

Now, that should be somewhat confusing, because in English we have separate words for this sort of thing: myself, themselves, herself/himself, ourselves, yourself, etc. But don't worry, 自分じぶん isn't so scary. Let's walk through its various usages!