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May. 22nd, 2007 10:48 amI'm finding something interesting in my Japanese language abilities (or current lack thereof). I seem to remember grammar easily--all kinds of complicated constructs, which particle goes where and why, how to conjugate verbs, the question words and a reasonable number of commonly-used adverbs and conjuncts like 'naruhodo' (naturally), 'shikashi'/'shikashinagara' (nevertheless)--but my store of nouns and verbs and simple adjectives is sadly depleted. It's as if someone had gone into my vocabulary filing closet, dumped out the drawers full of words, then sloppily swept most of them into a locked storage room. The ones that remain are oddly partial sets: I can remember that spring is 'haru' and summer is 'natsu', but fall and winter are missing.
It does seem that six or eight hours of Japanese landing on my ears has gotten me more connection to it than I've felt in years; maybe further intentional effort would find the key to that locked storage room. Inside of which there's probably another locked room, and so on and so forth, but every little helps.1
It's an odd place to be in. I think I would find the usual classroom curriculum next to useless, since grammar forms a great part of it and--at this moment anyway--grammar is not my problem.
Do any of you all speak, read or write Japanese? I'm considering trying something: I want to get a Japanese character input program for the computer and do maybe one post a week (for starters, since it will probably take all week to write at this point) in Japanese. It also occurs to me, as I write this, that phone-posting would be ideal for practicing speaking. If I do this, it'll likely be my first-ever opt-in filter--just because the non-Latin characters do weird things on the screen if you don't have the right character set to read them.
Think I'll also look into streaming video online from the NHK or somewhere. Any suggestions?
1(Was that Tesco or Safeway's slogan?)
It does seem that six or eight hours of Japanese landing on my ears has gotten me more connection to it than I've felt in years; maybe further intentional effort would find the key to that locked storage room. Inside of which there's probably another locked room, and so on and so forth, but every little helps.1
It's an odd place to be in. I think I would find the usual classroom curriculum next to useless, since grammar forms a great part of it and--at this moment anyway--grammar is not my problem.
Do any of you all speak, read or write Japanese? I'm considering trying something: I want to get a Japanese character input program for the computer and do maybe one post a week (for starters, since it will probably take all week to write at this point) in Japanese. It also occurs to me, as I write this, that phone-posting would be ideal for practicing speaking. If I do this, it'll likely be my first-ever opt-in filter--just because the non-Latin characters do weird things on the screen if you don't have the right character set to read them.
Think I'll also look into streaming video online from the NHK or somewhere. Any suggestions?
1(Was that Tesco or Safeway's slogan?)
