私の中休みと私の好きなレストラン

１月に母の誕生日と父の誕生日と弟の誕生日があるから、私達は素晴らしいレストランにいきました。家族は寿司が大好きたから、”寿司中澤”にいきました。”中澤”の寿司職人（sushi chef）は小野二郎（の主人公）の見習いでした。

今、”中澤”は３ミシュランの星のレストラン。

寿司は一番しんせんでとてもおいしかった。私の好きな寿司はホタテ貝(scallop)と大とろ（一番あぶらおおいチューナ）。すごかった。

おんがくのエクストラ：

The best chiptune song you'll ever hear

February PE Reflection

So far I would say my progress has been disappointing. I haven't really put in the time to go to language table or put in active practice outside of exercises. To make this more concrete, I plan on scheduling more frequent meetings with the instructors (i.e. at least 1x per week). Another useful thing is group work, which forces you to put time in. To this end, I plan on working with my friend Andrew in Terrace whenever possible, to avoid shirking from my duties.

As far as specific things I want to improve, I hope to be able to do shadowing exercises for anime without simply using phonetics. What I mean is that I wish to both understand what is being said while also being able to repeat it, where up until now I feel I have only been able to do one or the other much of the time. I think this is important if one wants to more deeply understand a language, rather than simply engaging on a surface level, and can be a good measure of competence. I understand the level of difficulty of this with vary with the exercises and anime examples (which is unfortunate, as I tend to like anime that are dialogue heavy and fast paced). 

This is a bit of a lofty goal, and I have a few things set in place to accomplish it. One of the main features of achieving this goal is to be able to get a mental image of the phonetics of a given speech sample, as well as the breaks between words. An important part of this is to know grammatical structures well, so as to not confuse oneself when an unexpected mora from an unknown particle shows up. Another part of this is vocabulary, which I definitely think I'm picking up better.

The other part is mechanical training, learning how to speak properly, with proper pitch patterns and with proper cadence, and to apply your parsing of a sentence quickly.

Shadowing is only half of a good PE experience though. One should strive to have good improvisational skills when making conversation. It is important for me to push myself to vary my sentence structure, but I often feel that I trip myself up with the correct particle usage, or supplying an example when responding to a question in class. I sometimes find that I'm so caught up in thinking about how to organize my sentence, that I forget to supply an example, and my slow short term recall of vocabulary can be a big hindrance.

In short, I think that I should continue learning more complicated structures with the rest of the class, but I think I should spend much more of my personal study time focusing on quick recall of basic grammar and vocabulary. I need to make those parts of conversation automatic, so that I can focus on other elements of my sentence when attempting to simulate fluid speech. In a future blog post, I will try to enumerate my specific failings in the basics, and then I'll try to go over these with my sensei's during office hours. 

One last thing I should try to avoid, which I believe will aid me greatly, is speaking English in class. By forcing myself into a permanent Japanese mindset for my drill class, and even asking for help with vocabulary or grammar in Japanese, I can develop muscle memory for these basic phrases. 

私のてがみ

私の好きなおんがく

私はおんがくをきくのが大好きで、おんがくのおおくのしゅるいをききます。それでも、好きなおんがくはかたやぶりなのでせつめいするのはむずかしいです。バンドをみせるのはもっと易しいです：

マグネチクフィルツ(The Magnetic Fields)

今、マグネチクフィルツは私のすきなバンド。そのバンドのうたはかなしいですが、とてもキャッチー(catchy) ですよ。

フィエリフルナス(The Fiery Furnaces)

フィエリフルナスはとてもおもしろいです。そのバンドのリズムとかしはへんでたのしいです。

あと、もっとおおくのバンドをせつめいします。

ミクドナルド

わたしのたんじょうび

あきやすみにたんじょびがありました。じゅうがつにじゅうはちにちにわたしのかぞくはレストナンにいきました。じゅコースばんごはんをたべました。おいしかった。そのごうちでかえりましたそしてプレゼントをうけとった。わたしのおとうとはほんをあたえたそしてわたしのりょうしんはあたらしヘッドフォンをあたえた。ほんはおもしろいそしてわたしはヘッドフォンがすき。たんじょうびはとてもよかった。

PE Reflection and new goals

Reflecting on my studies for PE, there have been some ups and downs. I did as I planned for office hours, but I haven't followed up on vocabulary study and anime shadowing to the extent I wanted. My transcription has definitely become quicker, but it's still not quite where I want it to be. I think my intonation patterns have improved slightly, though it's sometimes hard to tell. Learning new words means learning new pitch patterns, which hinders progress as mastering the pronunciation of all words I know. I'd say my tone is more even now, but that just comes from better fluency. I attribute my slight disappointment with my progress solely to my negligence with practicing; I think the activities I set for myself were sufficient. One addition I would put is to have a weekly study of Kanji, let's say 1 hour cumulatively per week, perhaps on the weekend. Additionally, I would revise my meetings with professors from once every 1.5 weeks to weekly, I've found it really helps.

As for goals, the ability to write fluently with Kanji, hiragana and katakana would be one of my goals, but I believe that's a long way off. I think any goal I could set for myself would be easily met with diligent practice, so I suppose my goal would be to look at my activities each weekend and make sure I've fulfilled them. Perhaps checking in with my sensee's on my activities would be a good way to add in a bit of accountability.

Commercials

I'm sure some people have seen their fair share of ridiculous commercials, particularly Japanese ones, but this one seemed particularly relevant: