Spring Impressions, Summer Vacation, and What is Up

First, let me take a minute to revise my thoughts on classes now that they are over:


Intensive Japanese 5:
Still the best class. We had to do a sort of half-assed research project at the end of the semester, but writing the presentation was a valuable experience. Even though the readings were pretty much all about crises (or perceived crises) in Japanese society, I enjoyed them and felt that most of the Japanese I learned here so far was related toour practice of select phrases and discussion of vocab in class.

Empathetic Conversation 4-5: My feelings on this are basically the same as they were before. Good content, hard to internalize. I don't know if some people maybe practiced with their friends outside of class? but if you take this, that is what I would recommend to seriously learn.

Extensive Reading 5-6: The final paper for this class kind of hits you out of nowhere as you struggle to remember what you've been reading over the past semester, but ultimately, reading without a dictionary is good and bad. You sacrifice depth for breadth, obviously, that is the idea. My main concern with it is that you sort of tend to "guess" on kanji/words you don't know, and if you keep guessing wrong, you are essentially "learning" things that are incorrect...

Vocab Building 5-6: Bizarrely, the hardest class. I often got failing grades on the homework assignments. My biggest problem was that I spend so much time doing the Japanese thing (or just screwing around) that I don't really have a background in say, current events, which turned out to be indispensable. I'm trying to work at that going forward...

Honorific Expressions for Communication 5: This class continued to be problematic for me. I have a better foundational knowledge of the categories of keigo, and I can do ok on multiple choice drills (which is how I'm reviewing this summer), but actually applying it on my own is still scary and awkward. Why we also had to do a half-assed group research project is beyond me. Why not spend that time on speaking drills or something instead?

Reading Comprehension Skills for Intermediate and Advanced Learners 5: Overall I did keep feeling that this class was really random, but was happy to have the practice. The grading was very much participation based, with no real homework. We had a final exam, which felt so strange since we were graded on barely anything else.

Enjoy Short Novels: Reading, Listening & Watching Videos 4-5: I continued to really value this class. The readings were the most "fun" out of all my classes, and I guess, that goes for the writing assignments, too. Sometimes the assessments were easy (and clearly just there to have something to grade?) but it was a good way for me to get my feet wet reading fiction in Japanese.

Music of Japan: from Nursery Rhymes to Lieder 4-8: Really happy with this class. I really almost wish I had studied more so I could sing the songs on command, they were that interesting and valuable as cultural touch stones (ok, maybe touch-pebbles, but still).

Developing Discourse Ability in Japanese 5: This class improved as the semester went on. Once we were able to write on our own, I felt more at ease. Some students said they would have rather done more activities like our final presentation, where we wrote about a personal experience, but others said they preferred writing about the dramas we were watching. Some people said it was really hard. For my part, I found it amusing that we spent so much time writing in what seemed at first glance to be a conversation class, but it was fine with me.

Learning Japanese Through Films - Think and Discuss What a Film Appeals to Us 5-6: Once I got over the shock of the class's true identity as series of listening comprehension drills (and made sure to study the vocab), I finally could relax and enjoy it. The highlight was finally watching Departures. I sort of wish we would have had more time to discuss, or that people would have had more to say, but anyways...got to watch some movies and try to have some academic thoughts about them; that made me happy, overall.


The Latest Japan on TV News 5: This was a great class, although the final paper was sort of tedious in that it was multiple parts, kind of almost like a survey. Honestly it kind of highlighted how "unacademic" feeling most of our assignments are. Everything is really casual, which I guess reflects that we are learners of the language, but I need to relearn how to write a proper paper if I hope to go to grad school. Anyways, I digress...uhhh...yeah I continued to like this class and actually made a lasting Japanese friend from the pool of volunteers who came to discuss "news" with us. (We almost always talked about whatever the hell, as none of us were really there to be experts in current events.) I'd like to say this class resulted in me having a news-watching habit, but I don't yet. I'll have to make that on my own.

Japanese Sentence Patterns for Communication (1) 5: This class ended up being just fine. Some of it was review, but that's ok. Gotta have a solid grammar foundation, and unless you are constantly reviewing, even the simple stuff can get shaky.

Here are the main activities of the summer:

Volunteer translation of a document written by the principal of a school in Kesennuma where the tsunami hit really hard last year after the earthquake. The work I am doing is just one part of a bigger document; I'm on a team with Japanese students, so it has already started to become a good way to meet people. Also I'm really impressed that they are managing to translate Ja>En. I'm having a hard enough time...

We're going to Kesennuma soon to meet some of the people involved in the publication and hear some of their experiences first-hand.

I'm also going on a trip to Fukui to experience some organic farming and food production...stuff!

Volunteering at the Tokyo Game Show at the end of the September pretty much right before school starts.

Wondering if I will be able to get a serious boyfriend ever again.

Getting really into seeing (raw) movies at the National Film Center, and loving that I live on the same train line so I don't have to transfer anywhere to get there.

Making pilgrimages to the Waseda Tai Chi club instructor's classroom over the summer break as often as I can (on Sundays). It takes about an hour and a half to get there, so it's good time to read manga or listen to podcasts.

Spending too much time researching grad school etc. to the point where it is disrupting my actual Japanese study.



Other than that I just wrote a new and way more aggressive plan for next semester:

Intensive Japanese 6
Learn Japanese Through the World of Hayao Miyazaki 5-6
Kanji in the Contemporary World 6-8
Explore the Essence of Japanese Classic Novels 5-6
Japanese Newspaper Reading 6-7
Contemporary Japanese through Cinema and News 6
Critical Reading 5-6
Refining Your Japanese Pronunciation with Ondoku & Shadowing 6-8
Reading and Discussing Novels by Contemporary Writers 6-8
Japanese Idioms 5-7
Japanese Sentence Patterns for Communication (1) 6


Honestly this schedule is probably insane. You may recall that I barely tested into level 5 last semester. The idea is that you move up after a semester (hence Intensive Japanese 6), but now is the time; there is only one semester left and I have to make the most of it. I feel like these are the kinds of class I should have been taking in undergrad and that's basically why I'm here, is to make up for undergrad offerings failing me.

The theme of the revised schedule is...READING. Pretty clearly. That is where I need to stop whining and step it up. Speaking will either come or not. I'm no good at speaking in English either, so I don't really expect great things. But the more I read the faster I will progress, so I just want to leap and bound for the next few months.

You may have noticed that instead of doing sentences patterns (2) 5 I'm going straight to (1) 6 next semester. That's quite frankly because there is not that much stuff that seems so difficult in the last half of the book. I am going through it this summer, and maybe I'm not in the most qualified to decide whether I have mastered a concept or not, but I think I'll survive just fine.

As for the other stuff, obviously I don't really NEED a class on Miyazaki movies, but I'm just curious what a class about anime is like. Probably like any other class, well that's cool. If people take it seriously it could be interesting. Also it sounds like we get to read some planning/production materials, so that could be fun.

Taking both the classic and contemporary surveys cuz why not. I hate reading extracts but it's more about collecting the names of the things we should read and then reading them over the summer or whatever...

Obviously that's a lot of classes, just a lot of classes, but one other one I want to mention is that kanji one. Course description basically just says, "We're going to master the daily use kanji (2140)." Yeah, that number used to be 1,945, but they updated it in 2010 to 2,136 when we weren't paying attention. Anyways, I'm kind of hovering somewhere around 1,000 right now and it's annoying me. I know it's more about vocab and actually reading than just knowing the kanji (esp having dropped out of the Heisig method ;P) but at least having studied them all once is a step in the right direction. I'm working on it on my own, but let's nail this jell-o to the wall, shall we?

In any case, I'll be FLYING to my computer on September 18th when registration opens to make sure I get all my classes.