+1 Challenge Weekly Update #5

Another busy week with lots of Japanese learning happening. As you can see from my video update, I've recovered from a short period of exhaustion. I was doing too many things at the same time and not wanting to give any of them up. This said, it did force to me to evaluate things and further optimize the approach I'm taking on this language learning mission. I haven't changed that much in my approach, but although I'm strictly keeping to my original plan, I've added "shadowing" as an activity which I'd not tried before. I tried it with an italki tutor and although I wasn't very good at it, I noticed how much more focused I became on listening to every sound that was uttered and sat there with a big gloopy grin on my face at the end of the session as I realized, that yes ... its more than just helping me my pronunciation of Japanese, it's re-configuring the way I listen to Japanese. Now, maybe it will take me some time to be speaking Japanese all clickety-clackity (that's the technical term I've invented to describe what I don't have the English vocabulary to actually describe) ... but that's the main difference between what I hear and what comes tumbling out of my mouth. Additionally, doing the "shadowing" has given me a lot of confidence that, yes, with some more practice ... I shall indeed be clickety-clackity-drum-sounding-babbler-awayerer in Japanese ... and that's an important difference ... I suppose it's because I've spent many years speaking only in the violin tones of English ... and I learned Japanese without talking it for quite a long time ... and then when I began talking in Japanese, imperfect pronounciation hardly ever prevented me from being understood. However, the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of speaking Japanese really well ... it's such a beautiful language. Yes, I shall continue to speak it with grammatically large boots for a while ... because when I become too conscientious of my pronunciation, fear of making mistakes creeps back into my mind ... and so, I think I decided that, yes, I shall aim to be a elegant verbal ballet dancer ... for that is my ultimate goal.

I also thought I'd get back into learning タイヨウのうた. I really love the song and the J-dorama it came from, but also found that it's been covered really well by natsubayashi on youtube:

 

Additionally, I decided that rather than learn to play the guitar from watching English tutorials, it was much more fun to learn to play the guitar in Japanese. So when I discovered that natsubayashi had created a tutorial teaching beginner's how to play this song, it soon became apparent that I don't actually have to understand that much Japanese to understand what he's communicating in his tutorial ... he's a great teacher in my opinion ... and I love the fact that he's teaching me Japanese without knowing it. I like to think that I'll search him out in Japan and say こんにちは なつばやし。あなたが僕ギタや日本語を教えました。ありがとうございます。

Anyway, I think that's all I'll write about in this blog update. It's been a while since I uploaded any of the materials that I've created over the last couple of weeks. I've made a few, but not shared them. I shall at some point ... but I'm hungry and want to go and make something to eat and then I'll be speaking with Mikie-san ... and then I think I'll have an early night because I've got an early morning italki session.

I'm on track as far as going through Tae Kim's grammar guide goes ... and I've apparently increased my vocabulary by about 350 words since the Challenge began and I've been noticing how much more frequently I'm hearing these words when I'm watching Japanese dorama these days. I'm addicted to a new series called "Miss Pilot" ... in the first episode I was amazed how much of the dialogue I could understand; they speak a lot of formal Japanese in this series because it's following a group of trainee pilots and they're often in formal situations. This said, I still haven't got a clue a lot of the time!