The Japanese Course I'm Taking
English

The Japanese Course I'm Taking

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language learning
daily life

In October, I started taking a Japanese course. I contemplated joining a second-year group, but I realized that after all this time I still can't read anything in Japanese and I don't understand the spoken language either. I tried to take the JLPT N5 mock test and couldn't finish it. So I joined a beginner group. I decided that I'd rather be bored with basics for a while than try to catch up with people who had consistently been learning for a year. Also, I might actually lack even some basic knowledge, so it's better to be safe than sorry.

We have two 1.5 hour lessons per week. The first few lessons were boring, as expected. We covered the basics: hiragana, katakana, greetings, etc. I think that a lot of people don't do their homework, because after eight lessons, they still struggle with hiragana, even though they should've nailed it weeks ago. So it's annoying, as those people slow the group down.

We started using the textbook "Minna no Nihongo". In every chapter, there's a list of words you're supposed to memorize. I don't think we're supposed to memorize their kanji as well — in the book, a phonetic notation known as furigana is provided until the very last chapter. Still, I'm adding those words with kanji to my Anki deck. But I'm not sure that I'm not just making things harder for myself — how useful is it for me to memorize the kanji for vending machine (自動販売機)?

After several lessons, our teacher informed us that some of the lessons would be taught by a native speaker. The prospect of interacting with a native speaker is exciting, but I can't help but be skeptical about it (as I always am): is it even that useful for us at this stage, when some of the people can't even read? And while this teacher can speak some Russian, it's also not perfect, so we will struggle to communicate.

So far we've had nine lessons. And even though I haven't learned much of anything new yet, the course gives me structure, which I lack in self-study. Hopefully I'll achieve better results with it.

Headline image by uns__nstudio on Unsplash

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