Japan-go

Class is getting difficult this term. I am realizing more and more how tough the teacher is for absences and tardies. Since I missed last weeks class, it appears that I won’t be able to make up the assignments. This week is our first test which I don’t know what to expect. I’ll hope for the best and study like crazy for the next 4-5 hours.

There is much to be said about the difference people have noticed in my Japanese skill within the past 3 weeks (since school started again). Not only have I refreshed my skills in hiragana and katakana but I am finally starting to learn Kanji. Kanji is based off the traditional chinese writing system. It is very artful in its design and character creation.

The class began with an engineer who went to Japan recently for work showing his experience on a slide show. Most of the time during his trip he was drunk, so we were really seeing him extremely inebriated and partying with his friends rather than the culture of Japan. I wonder how many people in the class who have not been to Japan have a distorted drunken perspective of Japan. The remaining pictures in his slideshow were of toilets, signs and landmarks (Tokyo Tower, etc.)

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The class has now gone through over 30 verbs and sentence construction is finally looking feasible. By the end of the class my brain was hurting…..too much information for one day. Tonight, with the information still fresh in my mind I will review what I learned.

I am continually impressed with the quality of the education at my school. This class just gets better and better. My instructor speaks in Japanese for most of the class usually practicing simple sentences that most students can interpret. There was a quiz during class about 10 questions long. I missed two of the questions….what is doctor and bank in hiragana. But I was surprised I knew the other questions. For the first time we created a sentence. Mary san wa dissatan de cohi o nimasu. I feel that the Japanese language (nihon-go) is getting easier now that I know hiragana and katakana along with verbs and particles.

It appears that every week we will have a quiz. Today I will study some of the material for next weeks quiz along with the standard homework.

Thursday’s class went great. I learned a lot in the time that I was there (2.5 hours). The instructor was more enthusiastic about teaching Japanese than the other instructor I had in the spring. The content of the course included learning 10 of my very first verbs in Japanese….how exciting!!! The other parts of the course were dedicated to reviewing the hiragana and katakana we studied last term.

This class is much bigger in size than the last class I took. As the instructor was reading off names on the attendance sheet, I realized that even though the class was packed full of people, there were numerous no shows. I don’t know where they are going to sit next thursday. Should be interested to find out.

I met one T.A. in the class who is from Tokyo. He is studying at a local private university but helps out by assisting the instructor at my community college. He told me that there are only 3 Japanese students at his university….pale in comparison to other colleges around.

My homework this week consists of getting enrolled in the Japanese tutoring class (mandatory for all students) and completing the crossword worksheets the instructor handed out. Next week we have our first quiz, mainly a review of hiragana and katakana.

Japanese class starts this Thursday at my local community college. I initially started taking Japanese 1A last spring to increase my understanding and speaking skills. The schedule was perfect for my work hours (only one class per week in the evening). I would return from work, then immediately go to class which would start just a few minutes before I got there. During the spring course I learned how to write and read hirigana and katakana. The real life application continued on my recent trip to Japan. I impressed my hosts with my limited knowledge in Japanese writing characters.

The class that begins this fall is Japanese 1B, a continuation of the first year Japanese class. This time around the syllabus says we will learn some Kanji words and verb tenses. The main benefit I find with this schools Japanese classes is that the teachers are all Japanese. That was a deciding factor on my choosing it over another school.