Learn Japanese

I was pretty slacking on my Japanese and saying things like, “Maybe I could use that time slot to take something INTERESTING next semester.” Now I feel a little better.

I’m wrapping up my second year of Japanese and I just spent a week with a native speaker who speaks very little English. My boyfriend’s friend from Hawaii came to town last week and brought his girlfriend from Japan.

Lessons Learned from a Native Speaker:
1. drink. drinking helps your Japanese immensely. You lose your inhibitions and aren’t afraid of sounding stupid.
2. girls don’t say ‘chinpo’, they say ‘asoko’.
3. Japanese drinking games are more fun than american drinking games
4. you can communicate a lot by circumventing the word you don’t know. ie: when trying to explain that I had to go to volunteer training, “free work”. Be creative.

It was also exciting to see myself correcting my boyfriend (he said ‘tabehoshii’ at one point and Yumi and I just cocked our heads at him :D). It was also exciting to see how far I’ve come. A friend’s girlfriend took first semester Japanese with me almost two years ago. She came out one night to hang out and she’s totally lost everything. (She’s been busy learning German and whatnot). So, that’s good, to see that and realize that if I don’t stick with it that’s going to be me.

I had the wonderful opportunity to substitute teach a high school Japanese class :D It was super inspiring. The students were only year 1 and had just started learning katakana so it was exciting to know more than they did (last year I subbed a higher level class at this school and was totally lost).

I’m not ethnically Japanese, so of course they had no reason to expect their sub to speak Japanese, but I wrote my name on the board in katakana. Still, they were trying to pull stuff. One kid started writing on the board “minnasan….” and I’m like, hello, I can read that buddy.

They were practicing verb conjugations and one student said they hadn’t learned maybe 7 of the verbs on the list, so I have him repeat them to me and then I go up to the board and start writing them (simple things like kikimasu, kaimasu, shukudai wo shimasu, etc) and the class becomes completey quiet and a student says “sugoi!” :D Made me super happy!!

I also met a very cool student who is fluent. He grew up in Japan and spent his last few years there in Okinawa, which is where my boyfriend grew up and where I visited for a month last year. So we reminisced about all the things we miss about Okinawa and that was really really neat.

So I’ve realized that now’s about the time to start speaking with native speakers of Japanese. My Japanese is considered intermediate by my school standards, I would consider myself an advanced beginner in speaking and a beginner-intermediate in writing.

So, I found a cool website where people can voice chat or e-mail or chatroom in their target language run by the Rosetta Stone (google Rosetta Stone Shared Talk if you’re interested) and it’s free. I was e-mailed by Hisa-san and we e-mailed a few times. I’ve never done voice chat before, so I decided to see if it worked and lo and behold, it did. I started writing back Hisa-san while waiting for a Japanese speaker to get online and then I got an invite to speak with Hisa. :D

I ended up downloading Skype, because he prefers it, and wow. My Japanese is both not as good as I thought it would be and also much better than I thought it would be. He said he was surprised at how good my Japanese was, but it’s hard to tell if that’s a generic compliment or a real thought. Probably a generic compliment. Although his English writing is totally proficient, he didn’t speak at all in English which made me think that his ability is like mine (a better reader/writer than speaker).

I think it’s a really really really good experience to do that, if you can. It was like nothing I have ever experienced before. Much harder than any Japanese I’ve ever done, but also much much much more satisfying.

However, I think in the future I’m going to chat with the ladies. I would be totally weirded out if my boyfriend was chatting to Japanese girls online, haha.

So, I’m very happy. I have a Japanese study date with my study partner tomorrow (ashta, gojihan ni toushyokan no go-sai wa patona ni aimasu), so hopefully we can both learn something tomorrow.

I am back in school with Fujiyamasensei and very excited. I’ve been doing my Pimsleur, my Heisig (800’s, yeah), the activities in my textbook (we don’t do most of the activities in the book, and for some reason I never took the initiative to do them either. I don’t think I was lazy, I just think I didn’t know any better. When I first started studying Japanese I thought it was enough to go to class every day, do my homework, and perform well on test. Haha), and talking to my boyfriend in Japanese.

I try to only use Japanese when I’m in Japanese class because it’s a waste of time to speak English.

Fujiyamasensei decided to seat us alphabetically to make us talk to different people with different ability levels (it’s the fourth semester of Japanese, so most people only talk to their friends. I don’t have any friends in my class, so I talk to everyone). I am seated next to a student whose Japanese is self-admittedly very bad. I was a bit dissapointed, but I’ve decided to turn my frown upside down. She needs a lot of practice, and I want a lot of practice, so tomorrow I’m going to ask her if I can get her phone number so we can talk on the phone in Japanese. This will help bring her up to speed, which obviously she wants or she wouldn’t be taking this class, and will give me extra practice and reinforcement.

I’ve also decided, AGAIN, that I’m going to go to Japanese club this semester. No really, I mean it this time. I should take advantage of every opportunity to speak Japanese. It’s silly not to go and hang out with people who love learning Japanese as much as I do.

Awkward Moment: seeing my last Japanese teacher in the locker room. If she weren’t half naked and talking on her keitai, I would have been very happy to see her.
Awesome Moment: seeing a picture of my current Japanese teacher’s family with her African American husband and their little mixied baby. Although I live in a major and diverse city, it’s still not super common to see mixed couples (ethnicity, racial identity, or culturally), so it makes me happy. I hope my kids grow up in a world where no one would ever bat an eye at such a thing.

Three cool moments:

1: sitting at SushiMon (yum yum yum!) and wanting to tell my boyfriend things about the people sitting around us, but we’re too close to the tables next to us so it would be impossible…if we weren’t learning Japanese! We chatted with semi-ease and apparently the dude on the left was looking at us all impressed-like.

2: being at a New Year’s Eve party with my boyfriend and his friend Adam – they grew up in Okinawa, Japan together. Adam doesn’t speak any Japanese, boyfriend speaks some. Boyfriend asks me “karitai?” and I reply in English (champagne will do that to you!) and Adam looks totally shocked. “YOU SPEAK JAPANESE!?”

3: being at same party and finding a marker board on the fridge where I write a message to my boyfriend in Japanese. A fellow party goer watches and is like “oh my god that is so cool!”

こんいちは!
good afternoon
せんしゅまつ わたし は たくさん にほんご を れんしゅうしました!
Last weekend I had lost of Japanese practice!
かれし と いしょ に いつつ にほんご の えいが を みました.
Together with my boyfriend, I watched 5 Japanese movies.
DragonBall と Linda, Linda, Linda と The Sea Is Watching と Grave of the Fireflies と Kamikaze Girls を みました.

Okay, my IME is not happy so I’ll finish this up in English. I’m sharing this movie info with you, by the way, because these were all movies I found at my local Hollywood Video in the “Foreign” and “Special Interest” sections, which means you can probably find them there in yours as well.

DragonBall is a great way to get in touch with the collective male Japanese childhood experience. The show has been on basically forever (my boyfriend is 26 and watched it in the 2nd grade, and it had already been going on for a long time before that, and it’s still on today!) so I think it’s safe to say that any Japanese dude will be impressed when you bust out your knowledge of “Supa genki dama!” and “Higher Dragon” which are basically the only things I learned from the show. The fight sequences are long and boring, but the Japanese is really basic and had I remembered to bring the DVDs to my house today, I definetly would be rewatching it to steal phrases and sentences.

Linda, Linda, Linda is the best learning tool for where you want your Japanese to be. It’s a really really fun interesting movie (high school girl band loses member, and must take on Korean foreign exchange student whose Japanese isn’t the greatest to be their singer). It’s filled with young adults (men and women, but mostly women) using real Japanese and that’s a movie I want to watch like a 5 year old watches High School Musical and memorize every line, because every line is basically useful.

Kamikaze Girls is fun, and it has a lot of slang, and it makes fun of a lot of Japanese pop culture and style. It’s about a yanki (gangsta type) chick who meets one of those girls you see in the Fruits book who is specifically into 18th Century French style, basically frilly dresses and lots of indulgence. The movie is okay and has funny parts. I wouldn’t mind rewatching it for some sentence stealing, but I probably wouldn’t pay to rent it again to rewatch it.

The Sea is Watching is not the most useful for Japanese study, but it’s just an incredible movie. I used to hang out with a bunch of film majors and as a non-film-major their conversations could be boring because I just don’t really ‘see’ whether a movie is brilliantly filmed. But this movie is brilliantly filmed. Every scene is perfect. The words, the view, the lighting, the weather, the acting. Perfect. But how much useful Japanese are you going to learn from a movie that takes place in a Japanese geisha brothel? Not a whole lot.

Grave of the Fireflies When I used to hang out with the film majors they tried to make me watch this movie, and I was like “ohmygod cartoons are dumb! Who cares if the cartoons are dying!?” (it’s a war movie) Obviously I’m much more openminded towards ‘animated film’. This is the most depressing movie ever. EVER. We would have spent the whole rest of the night in a funk if we hadn’t happened to catch the last five minutes of the Wedding Singer on TV right afterwards. Not terribly useful Japanese, and a lot of the movie lacks dialogue so I don’t know that I’d recommend it for Japanese study. But it’s beautifully done and we all need a reminder about how much war sucks, specifically wars that target civilians, so I’d say watch it anyway.

しんねんおめでとうございます。(happy new year!)

It’s really sweet that I could write that title in Kanji, if I could ever figure out how to work my computer’s Japanese, haha.

RTK 683 – I haven’t tested myself on all these and I just pounded the last 100 into my brain so let’s not consider that a conclusive amount of what I ‘know’

Pimsleur Lesson 28 – I did go back and start at Lesson 24 and build my way back up. I have a really hard time with ‘mou’ and ‘mada’ so I reviewed those lessons a few extra times as well. I also finally got Japanese 1, 2, and 3 in their entirety on my iPod thanks to my local library. Yay for saving $700, eh?

alljapaneseallthetime.com is going well. I finally found a video converter that works on my iPod (for whatever reason Ares Tubes videos weren’t playing? now I’m using Videora just fine) so I put on some TV shows from You Tube. It’s super picky though, and for whatever reason won’t download my favorite show, School Days. Bah! I also finally watched Seven Samurai and Densha Otoko. Seven Samurai was really good, but didn’t do anything for my Japanese (besides being around it, which is good), Densha Otoko was really great. My boyfriend and I were repeating little phrases used in the movie that we’ve heard other places and the text/audio combo that occurs so often during the blogging scenes is really awesome.

I’ve started dreaming in Japanese occasionally. sugoi!

I found a Japanese church that is literally two blocks away from my house, and they have services in Japanese. I do not and have not ever belonged to any church and don’t really plan to, but it’s a chance to be around people speaking Japanese. My boyfriend doesn’t want to come with me (not for religious reasons, but becuase he doesn’t think it will be useful to him considering where his level of Japanese is at) which is a bummer, but probably better. I think people are more likely to approach people when they’re alone, so maybe I’ll get to talk to some people (maybe even in Japanese?)

I am a snowball. I feel like I’m on the cusp of everything coming together in a really awesome way. I’m rolling rolling rolling and just soaking up info.

I’m reading “Born on a Blue Day” which is about an autistic savant. One of his savant abilities is the ability to pick up on languages SUPER EASILY. He learned Icelandic in a week and speaks a bunch (in the 6-10 range?) of languages fluently. Although obviously I’m not a savant and it’s obviously taking me more than a week, his story still inspires me. I really belive that we’re all capable of much more than we think we are, we just never try hard enough to find out.

-91% accuracy on the first 395 RTK kanji
-Completed Pimsleur Japanese Lesson 27, but want to go back to Lesson 24 and review as I don’t have the accuracy I want
-Did the first 30 or so sentences on my Anki following the alljapaneseallthetime.com method. Actually using the method I totally think it’s the best way to study. I’ve got a dozen sentences floating around my head right now that I can recall in Japanese. Can’t wait to get started on this more.
-I’ve finally recieved ALL THE PIMSLEUR CD’s from my library so I uploaded them all to my ipod. Hooray!
-My boyfriend and I had a very silly slightly naughty conversation in Japanese. Very fun. Made me laugh.

I’ve got the next two weeks off of school and work. I can’t wait to submerse myself in Japanese! :D I do need to start working on my JPN 214 kanji though.

I’ve got 91% accuracy on the first 373 Heisig Kanji.

I’m on Lesson 23 of Pimsleur.

Sweet.

Well, I’m really happy with where my Japanese is going. I finished the semester of 3rd semester Japanese with an A and am taking 4th semester next year. Kind of a bummer, because my uni only offers a few more Japanese classes and…then what? I’m completely capable of self study (I’m on my own extracurricular Japanese study plan already), but I do like having classes for structure and grammar and the resource and just being around other people who want to learn Japanese.

I’m up to Kanji 234 on Remembering the Kanji. Today is my last final, and then the free time starts. I have two weeks of doing absolutely nothing, thanks to being a substitute teacher and colelge student – no work and no school. I want to make a HUGE dent in RTK before the next semester starts on Jan. 22.

At the very least I should be adding 25 kanji a day on weekdays and weekends. On my Free Days (no work or school), I’m aiming for 50 a day. This will bring me to 1484 out of 2042. The rest I should be able to pump out at a slower rate, maybe by spring break?

Mastering the kanji is, I think, a great way to remove a major mental road block. Also, it’s easier to learn kanji when you already know the word, so I assume it’ll be easier to learn words once I already know the kanji. Once I have the kanji, I really want to focus on vocabulary as that seems to limit me. As one language website said, if someone came up to you in English and said “please train thank you station where?” you’d know what they wanted, even though they’re using NO GRAMMAR. I don’t want to talk like that, of course, but it’s better to communicate poorly than not communicate at all.

My boyfriend is getting serious about studying as well, which makes things easier and better. We say simple little things in Japanese sometimes.