Beginning to learn Japanese

the other evening, i was struggling with my homework. i haven`t been in school in so long, i`m not used to it. i`m not used to have to actually practice practice practice. it’s not that it’s hard, practice is agonizingly boring. it’s painfully boring, it’s phenomenologically, massively, excruciatingly boring. boring-boring-boring. ok. i`ll stop now!

i’m given black and white sheets with drawings on them. how should i ‘engage’ with them? they are out of context, and make no sense. i can say the words, and write the sentences, but the meaning is not sticking.

and at home one evening, i was being vocal about this fact. ronan was being very nice. he came over to the table and looked and made suggestions about how to approach the work. he also helped out with some of the vocabulary that i could not find in my dictionary. but still i kept on moaning about how BORING the work was. he said that learning isn’t always fun, and learning is hard work!

i totally disagree! i argued that learning is fun, and should be fun. yes, it should also be difficult and challenging, which can be frustrating, but in the end it is wholly satisfying, and should be one of the most fun things we can do. it should not ever be boring.

the mind-numbing dullness of `homework` was making me feel like i was never ever going to learn japanese, and i said that i was going to quit while i was ahead, and forget about ever learning japanese. and that i could have a perfectly fine time living in a country and not speaking the language. and HEY i used to teach english to spanish-speaking people who had lived in the US for 7 yrs and didn’t know a single word, and they managed just fine!

he snapped at me: “stop being so NEGATIVE!” … and of course, oddly enough telling someone that kind of thing when they’re being negative does not reverse the attitude as he probably hoped it would. we’ve made up since!

but it’s true, i needed to snap out of it. anyway, i figured i’d paid for the class, and i was going to finish it, even if it destroys my interest in learning japanese completely.

i’m quite fatalistic.

how to make dull learning tasks more fun: put them in context

alas, i had been devising ways to make my homework more interesting. by putting the tasks IN CONTEXT! not a radical idea, really, but it helps so much.

one week i got a sheet my teacher gave me had a map of different kinds of buildings, and i was to practice the locations of the buildings and a park in relation to each other. so, instead, i took an A4 map of downtown Oita, and looked for the kinds of places, like the こばん (police box) and found out where it was in relation to the 駅、(えき) (train station).

another sheet showed the floors of a department store, and information about what is on which floor. so it was alot of vocabulary, and the words for floor, elevator and escalator. so, i went to a REAL department store, and visited each of 6 floors. this was not an unpleasant task of course and i noted what was on each floor, and i went home and drew my own map. i also noted the words they used for the various departments, and types of things, and wrote these down.

by putting the tasks in authentic context, it makes it much more interesting, engaging and fun! and that is the way it should be. it’s not that i lack motivation, i lack attention span!!

when i showed my teacher the things i had been doing, she was very interested and pleased. she asked me where i got that small map of Oita. (it’s pretty cool since it has english and kana/kanji, and it quite clear and simple).

from now on, i will start taking more responsibility for making my learning more fun. and i will get that homework DONE.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2006 at 7:47 am and is filed under Personal, 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.