Here I am on day 162 of learning Japanese! I thought that Leap Day would be a good day for a post. In less than a month I will be at my six month mark. Time has gone so quickly. I've been working really hard using Anki to learn new words and I do my best to use and remember them even though it's difficult for me. I figure as long as I'm moving forward and learning, growing, and understanding more that's all that matters. I also still make sure to use JapanesePod101 and learn a little new grammar everyday.
Lately when I'm out driving around I try to stay in Japanese the whole time. If I'm by myself when driving I talk out loud to myself, and when I'm grocery shopping, etc. I think in Japanese as much as possible. It's kind of fun to think in Japanese enough to feel a little weird switching back to English. Keep in mind my level of speaking/thinking in Japanese pretty much goes like this: これは車です。このペンは黒です。その車は黄色です。あの木は多きです。その店は高いです。その食べ物は安いです。For those that can't read this, what I wrote says "This is a car. This pen is black. That car is yellow. That tree over there is big. That store is tall. That food is cheap."
Another thing I tried the other day was while watching tv I had to identify in Japanese one thing on each frame of the show I was watching. Or I had to describe what was going on. So for example on the particular show there were a lot of nature scenes and families doing activities together so I would think 草 "grass" when the scene showed a field of grass, 家族 "family" when the scene showed a family together, or 女の子は走っています "girl is running" when a girl was running.
I feel both awesome and super juvenile at the same time when I do this. Gotta practice the basics though. I figure it's good for me to stay in Japanese even if I feel like a two year old. I'm having a hard time doing better sentences than this. I want to be able to think in Japanese and say things that are about what I think and feel about things, not just describing things. I'm really trying but I also feel like I'm struggling. I just need more practice in the right ways. I guess after learning for 162 days I feel like that is long enough that I should be able to do more with my vocabulary than how I feel I'm doing. I have done lang-8 to try and help me with this but I need to do more than that, or just do it a lot more often. We'll see. This is what I feel is my biggest hurdle at the moment. Part of the problem is that all the things I struggle with are things that are hurdles for me in my native language of English as well. Most of my English language encounters are about simple boring things and not generally concerning my thoughts or feelings.
In fun news, I have been practicing my writing more. I ordered a brush pen and got it in the mail today and was excited to try it out. Here's some writing I did today first using the thick end and next trying the thin end of the pen:
In the second photo I wrote all the first year 一年生 kanji. In the first photo I just wrote a few of the first year kanji and also accidentally wrote on the left side of the paper. Oops! I was so excited to try out my new pen I guess.
Can't wait to see how I've progressed by my next post!
じゃまたね。
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