You may give yourself heart and soul to something, being focused and determined. Yet, you fail and you have no one to blame but yourself. Well, perhaps it's no consolation, but you can at least learn how to express what happened to you in Japanese.
The most common phrase to express the fact that you have tried as hard as you can is isshokenmei. Isshokenmei ni yarimashita means, "I gave it everything I had." But if you brought failure down on your own head, you might say, jigojitoku da. If someone else says this of you, it has the not-so-subtle nuance of "You made your bed, now lie in it!" Not so nice, perhaps, but you've no choice but to stew in your own juice.
What we are dealing with in the two expressions above are phrases made up of four kanji. There are hundreds of four-kanji phrases in common use in Japanese. These are by no means easy to learn for the nonnative speaker (and not so easy for the native speaker either!). But if you wish to truly master Japanese, I recommend these to you. They will turn a competent speaker of Japanese into a highly articulate one.
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