How’s it going?
Hajimemashita はじめまして。
Yesterday was oddly milestone-ish for my language learning. Not only did I hit the two hundred consecutive days in Duolingo, but my second night at my in person language classes went a lot better than the first. Bank on that also in the last couple weeks we have secured tickets to both Ghibli Park and Tokyo Disneyland for our upcoming trip, my immersion into the culture of Japan recently has taken up a good chunk of my brain space.
Last night in class we spent the first hour working through some common greetings and expressions, and of course the culturally appropriate ways in which to use each of them. I now have a long list of two or three word phrases that I should probably spend the week working to memorize.
After the break we focused on some of the hiragana and numbers. It’s basically like kindergarten, singing the count to ten song and learning how to draw basic characters.
Though, I suppose, every technique I’ve tried to date has had a wildly different approach. Duolingo treats you like a cross between a rushed tourist and a language scholar and works through the foundations of the language basics to build grammar and understanding. That audiobook I bought started by throwing complex thoughts at me, like “I’m going to eat sushi at the restaurant tonight with Hana,” and then shifting the words and ideas around in the hopes that understanding is uncovered. My flashcards, of course, are all about rote memorization. And this language course, as it turns out, seems to be a kind of building-blocks of conversation approach where we learn simple phrases and then add to it as we go along.
My brain is less of a sponge for any of this than I was anticipating.
I have been learning words and phrases one day and then feeling them there on the tip of my tongue the next but unable to spit them out. It’s been a grind. Japanese is not for the feint of heart.
Many of the people in my class are relative pros, of course. I’m having trouble parsing the participation matrix in this particular set of people which seems to range from absolute beginners (like me, guys who have been dabbling with apps for six months or so) to folks who have obviously studied the language in the variously distant pasts so much so that some seem to have a firm grasp on what we are doing: as if a grade two student showed up in kindergarten and flummoxed the other kids with their proficiency at tying their shoes. You know?
I don’t expect proficiency, but having a few dozen things comfortably (and permanently) lodged in the ridges of my grey matter would sure be a quality result here.
