I don't need to date these titles!

My practice tonight consisted entirely of review, but dove more in depth into the mechanics of the sentences I've been practicing over the past few weeks. Rather than just learning the nouns and verbs, I'm learning the way the words relate to each other. The why as opposed to the how. Although doing so without any explanation in English (something these lessons leave out entirely, which is both beneficial and frustrating sometimes) can make coming to the correct deductions rather difficult. However, I find if you put the puzzle together yourself (and then verify, of course) rather than get hand-held through the process, a) it's more rewarding, and b) you've got that mental map that you can retrace your steps with should you ever come across the same obstacle again.

These exercises have caused me to appreciate the English language as well. I never have been, and will never claim to be an expert of the English language. I do not consider myself a great writer and I'm sure this blog is full of many grammatical errors. That doesn't mean that I'm not able to appreciate the workings of the written (and spoken) word, however!

I still struggle with some of these exercises, but I wind up thinking that I may be expecting too much of myself too soon. Perhaps because I'm so anxious to understand everything. At face value, what the exercises show me, I do rather well. I average 2 or 3 questions wrong out of 150 at a time, quite often my mistakes are made because I answer too quickly and I mix up easy words (like man and woman, otokonohito and onnanohito), and then I go back and correct myself. But I like to take the time to sit an analyze the sentences I'm given, seeing if I understand the construction of the sentence and not just the key words (like I mentioned in a previous post, deducing answers from familiar words, if I see boy and bike in a phrase, I'll know that picture is the one to click).

Then I ask myself, if I was put on the spot, would I be able to compose this sentence on my own? I know I could say simple things such as "What are you doing?" "Nani o shite imasuka?" without hesitation. And even some sentences involving newer material, such as "This is my older sister." "Watashi no oneesan desu.". But there are times where a sentence will appear and I'm quite certain if I were asked to translate it to Japanese, I'd be unsuccessful. Perhaps this program just hasn't begun to flex those mental muscles yet! It tests my spelling skills very rarely as of yet, anyways. And rarely does it ask me to speak aloud a sentence without it written in front of me. There are occasions though where it speaks aloud 3 sentences, all accompanied by photographs, and presents me with a fourth photograph which I have to speak the description of, using the previous examples as guidelines. Those exercises are scary but I feel great when I get them right!

Anyways, that's just me really figuring out where I'm at. I have to remind myself that I'm only about 5 or 6 weeks into all of this. I think for that amount of time that I'm doing pretty well!

-Brendan

Things I learned today

• dare = who
• ga = puts emphasis on the subject immediately preceding it, making it the focus of the sentence.
• wa = designates the subject of the sentence and places importance on the rest of the sentence.
• I also learned that I can spot typos in hiragana! At least I think I can... when reviewing numbers, and training myself on the correct suffixes to use when counting things, I was shown "eight chairs" and read aloud "hakko no isu", and I had to fill in the correct kana for は＿のいす。 I was given the choices of　っ (a small tsu - つ which puts emphasis on the following consonant sound in the next syllable), まい-mai, and はん-han (I think). None of them looked right to me, hearing "hakko" I expected to see はっこ. I did some investigating online and found no instances of "はっのいす。" existing anywhere, but plenty of はっこの as a preface to counting eight of various things. Things like this make me feel better about my earlier expressed doubts, at least I -am- making progress in some areas!

Questions on my mind

• Actually, the last point above was my single question of the day, but I answered it myself!

Parting practice phrase

Otousan to musukosantachi wa asonde imasu. おとうさんとむすこさんたちはあそんでいます。The father and his sons are playing.