Beginning to learn Japanese

wow! those GTD guys blow me away. i saw some hilarious cartoon of “your brain on multitasking” and it’s so true. 日本 a go-go write about it recently, about his own lesson plans, and what he does each day. and mike wrote about it before on japanese! japanese!. i know GTD is going global because someone was talking to me in sligo about 43 folders just two days ago. and it’s intriguing for sure.

looking at 日本 a go-go, i’m starting to think that my own personal plans for learning japanese have been way too lenient. compared to mike’s “personal lesson plans” you’d wonder if i was studying japanese at all. i’ve been diving around willy nilly, dipping my fingers in all kinds of japanese pies, but i think not absorbing much… we’ll see when i get there. my learning goals were pretty low though, so if i don’t reach them, i’m v worried!

the only thing i do daily is listen to at least 30 mins of any japanese audio programme, with my dictionary handy. and i take notes in my offline notebook. which, when my friend saw it she commented that it looks like i spend more time doing the drawings than studying! but i’m fairly confident that i actually ‘know’ everything in the book, not much in there, mind you, but hey.

as far as any kind of personal syllabus… i’ve tried to tackle ‘topics’, my notebook has ‘topic’ pages, like 2 pages on the body, and 2 pages on placement of objects (inside, behind), and numbers, etc. but the pages are not filled at once, i keep adding to them.

and i’ve tried to follow a new kind of ‘topic’ each week. i had a whole time-telling two weeks with numbers and telling time, and i think i got it down pretty much. then recently i’ve been focusing on ‘going’ places, and moved into past tense and conjugating verbs of going places/arrival, etc. last week.

next i want to work on adjectives. this week i spent a one evening looking up names of colours, and cutting out paper and shapes to glue into my notebook. pure goofiness, but fun. but i was listening to the NHK audio programme the whole time. oh yeah! if i find a useful corressponding audio programme i write down the name of the audio file into the notebook, so i can listen/look along. usually my notebook notes come from the audio lessons, and are filled out with examples from the dicitonary or other books i have.

other than that, i try to do chapters of what i call “japanese for boring people”. but i’ve had to re-do chapters several times, because when i skip ahead i realize i don’t know what they’re on about. the book is getting covered in highlighter marks and pencil marks. alas.

i just got a whole stack of japanese movies to watch (thank you Karol!), so that will be good!

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 19th, 2005 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Learning Methods. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.