ココです。
So far I felt like I have isolated many of my weaknesses in a few pronunciation difficulties. Most notably is the quick progression from one voiceless syllable to the next, as well as quick progression between syllables with the same vowel. My rhythm sounds off at times as well. Word pitch tends to be exaggerated at times, bland at others.
Goals:
To improve my fluidity between voiceless syllables and multiple syllables with the same vowels.
To improve my pitch to become a consistently present part of my speech.
Activities:
Go to office hours at least once a week, if possible.
Try short periods of shadowing from any Japanese media I watch.
Go to the Japanese language table every week.
おやすみ。
John K/ココ、はじめまして！ルー(Luu)です。どうぞ よろしく。
ReplyDeleteわたしは ノートルダーム大学のよねんせいです。
Your posts are giving me an extra push I've been needing for awhile to commit to learning Japanese. I'm taking it as a fourth year after being in Japan this summer but I feel like I'm doing just enough to get my assignments done and not much beyond that...Your more systematic and dedicated approach to learning is going to totally going to pay off. I'm going to try to pay more attention to my progress and points of weakness as well. Thanks for the inspiration!
My roommate for the summer was an international Korean student from Reed and man she had a leg up. She recognized a lot of the kanji even though the pronunciations are different. Many of the Japanese people we met also said that Koreans seem to have the least difficulty learning Japanese so there ya go :)
Also, thanks for the post about the new Studio Ghibli movie--I really like the artist's style in that one so I'll have to look into it.
Nice to meet you! Thanks for the encouraging words; it's always exciting to see students from other universities on my blog.
ReplyDeleteI have very great interest in Japanese, and since I speak Korean, it's been a relatively easy time, with a lot of times where I go "aha". The grammar of Japanese and Korean are almost one-to-one, making it very easy to compare the two languages and see if one makes sense from the other. I guess I'm pretty lucky in that regard.
Koreans do recognize a lot of kanji, but since it's a dying form of writing in Korean it's becoming less and less useful for them to learn. I hear there's just an elective in junior high teaching Chinese characters. A lot of the older generations, of course, still know almost all of them. My main motivation to learn kanji has been the similar Sino-Korean and Sino-Japanese vocabulary that I come across ALL THE TIME. The pronunciations, though they aren't identical, are similar enough so that if I see the Chinese characters and pronounce them the Korean way I can sort of memorize the Japanese pronunciation quite easily.