Japanese Class

Japanese class went pretty good today. I felt like I was on-top of the material, maybe even a little ahead. That's cool.

My pronunciation is pretty horrible, but I found a good resource that will hopefully correct that. It's called Easy NHK - As far as I can tell, it's Japanese news for dummies. The announcer talks very slow, the article is written mostly in hiragana and where kanji is present it has furagana to help. Pretty much exactly what I need to improve my listening skills. The obvious problem is my "reading" is waaaay behind. If I listen to a passage several times, I can start to follow the words, but it's a laborious undertaking.

I suspect it will get easier once my vocabulary starts to increase and I go from recognizing "characters" to recognizing complete words (just like english - our brains actually parse entire words and not the letters in them).

Also, our teacher showed off and recommended a good application from the Japan Foundation for memorizing hiragana. The main feature that I saw was that it both tested you, plus allowed you to practice your strokes in writing (on the ipad) as well as pronounced the phonetic sound for you as well. I'm going to download it to my wife's ipad since I don't own any apple devices!

Our next class is delayed a week due to a holiday and scheduling conflict, so we will be meeting on October 10th. I'll make sure to practice a lot between now and then!