Japanese Class Today

Had my second official Japanese class today. Technically it's the 4th one of the "semester" but I started late. It was all fine though because it was relatively easy to catch up and our teacher, Masako-san, spent some time with me after class to review the earlier chapter.

My take away so far is:

Things I can evidently handle well

• Rote memorization of numbers (I was really fast compared to everyone else)
• Learning hirigana (I'm using a flashcard program which seems to have given me a leg up)

Things I suck at

• Listening - Hell, even when I know what the teacher is saying I have a hard time following.
• Pronunciation - As expected, this is horrible. This is compounded by the fact that I have a stutter that I've managed to successfully hide through years of speech therapy as a child.

Next week our teacher is supposed to bring in an app to show off that basically is a combination of hiragana flashcards with phonetic pronunciation built into it. I'll keep an eye for something like this that I can download to my computer or phone. I have a sense that if I focus on thinking about everything as phonemes (ergo, か  = "ka" sound) and then restrict myself to only speaking these sounds, I might be able to slowly conquer my pronunciation problem.

At the very least, I'll be able to read and speak hiragana (even if I don't understand the word I'm saying... vocabulary is entirely another matter).