So. I’ve got flashcards, with the hiragana and katakana on them. I’ve got tapes with exercises, and I’ve got two textbooks.
I seem to be pretty well set up, in terms of beginning the self-study of Japanese.
On the other hand, both of the textbooks use roumaji, which I’ve heard is the horrible, in terms of developing a working understanding of the language. So I’m going to want to work something out such that I do the exercises in the book while transcribing the text, or something… Additionally, I grew up reading science fiction in which people listened to learning tapes while they slept to increase their learning rate. I have no idea whether that sort of thing actually might work, but I figure it can’t hurt to try. As the tapes I have are fairly traditional language-study things, complete with narrator and beep-separated sections, I don’t think that they’ll work out so well. I intend to compile some cds or something that should do the trick–but I’ll need to find a microphone.
My goal, at the moment, is to learn enough over the course of the next several months that when I start taking formal courses next fall, I should have an easy time with the material.
Why am I putting to much effort into this now? It’s because if it’s not easy when I get to the actual classes, I might just drop the whole notion of it. I’ve never had an easy time learning languages, and Japanese has the additional hurdle of learning a new alphabet and system of pronunciation. It may be more self-consistent than English’s, but it’s still different. I don’t want to end up dropping this notion; it’s currently the biggest path I have on the way to ensuring that I live an interesting life.
There are only a few weeks left in the term. The project will be done by then, and I’ll have to go back to taking actual classes. I get the feeling that the next few weeks will be busy, a lot more productive than most of the past month or so… but I’m ready for that now. Compressing the major projects into a single term is like taking a vacation from all the regular schoolwork, but after this much vacation, you want to get back into the swing of things.
I’m active. I’m ready. I’m going to accomplish things now.
No comments yet.