I cannot believe that 7 weeks of Japanese study have already gone by. It has been challenging at times, but extremely rewarding and I am loving this class! Looking back on my speaking exercises, I realize that I have made a lot of progress towards achieving some of my goals while others still need work. Earlier in this blog I stated that I wanted to improve my speaking in four ways (pronunciation, accuracy, speed, and comfort/confidence) in order to sound like a native speaker. While I am still a LONG ways off from that, I do believe that my pronunciation has become marginally better, my differentiation between mora has improved, and my speed and comfort speaking have risen immensely from my first week. Confidence has been one of my biggest obstacles in language classes. Speaking a foreign language, I have always struggled to quickly compose my thoughts in a way that I like and think is worth other people hearing, and as a result hesitate or jumble my phrases. I think that Japanese has made me accept my mistakes and learn from them. In the past 7 weeks, the PE exercises have helped me with this confidence as well as how I actually sound.
While many of the activities and goals that I planned to do have been worked on, some of them slipped through the cracks. I haven't been able to make it to as many office hours or language tables as I'd like due to my extracurriculars, and I haven't been able to spend 10-30 minutes listening to Japanese dialogues/music each day. This is something I'm going to try to emphasize as I enter the second half of the semester.
On that note, here is a new and improved goal statement:
GOALS:
-Pronunciation: To further clarify my pitches and mora in order to sound like authentic Japanese.
-Speed: To continue to talk/shadow at a regular speed WITHOUT missing particles or jumbling my pronunciations, and to improve regular conversational speed.
PLAN:
-Go to Japanese Language tables as often as possible.
-Go to Office Hours whenever I have questions or a topic that is giving me a particular amount of trouble.
-Listen to 10-30 mins of Japanese music/dialogue each day.
-Shadow at least once per week.
-Attempt to learn more vocabulary on my own, through friends, websites, media, etc...
Well, that's all for now.
じゃあ、また！
メイヒュー
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