I forgot to write about 2 weeks ago and unfortunately I got pulled into a work event last week and was forced to cancel, so yesterday was the first day in 2 weeks.
2 weeks ago was English only again. She gave me a list of different conversation starters and wanted me to pick from them and just mainly practice her conversation skills. The questions I picked were things like, āwhat is your favorite room in your house.ā They were interesting things to talk about - Iām certainly someone who could talk for a long time about basically anything, but from my perspective itās not all that challenging to her. She tells me it is, saying āIām simplifying and thereās a lot Iām not able to say,ā but I feel like the way to help her improve would be to give her something more challenging.
What might help is if I can get some news articles or short essays for her to read out loud, maybe even TOEFL prep material too, because as far as I know she hasnāt taken it and it would be a good idea for her to try it, at least as a measure of progress. I will be the first one to argue that tests arenāt perfect representations of ability, especially in language, but they provide a good metric and give you clear goals on what to learn.
Yesterday, in our Japanese meeting, I decided to focus specifically on speaking and pronunciation. I read off some of the earlier conversations in Genki for the first few chapters and created sentences based off some pictures. I was very glad I did this, because she pointed out areas where I noticeably interjected English pronunciation. ć in particular I was pronouncing as āsheeā with a very strong āshā sound. This meant speaking å±±äø sounded like yamashhhhhta. After watching her mouth, I realized itās a completely different mouth movement than I was doing. I was giving a good approximation, but I realized I need to go back and really practice this again.
While Iām glad she finally figured out what skill level Iām at, since I canāt really hold a conversation, itās difficult for her to be able to reply with much more than ććć§ć or just repeating what I said, so I feel the best use of my time for right now is spending more time on pronunciation and reading. When I have a stronger ability to read and speak, then we can start focusing more on listening later. By that point, I should have a better ability to reply back. Listening is definitely something Iām very weak on, but I think itās better to do one thing at a time and get good at that, rather than trying to get good at everything at once.
Like everyone, I have moments of āI know everything!ā and āI know nothingā¦ā though in my case, the latter is much more frequent. Iāve been using the self-study script (thanks @rfindley) to really start pushing my WK level times down. I finished the last two in 9ish days and Iād like to get that down to 8 or even 7. I promised myself I would re-attempt reading once I hit level 16, so now that Iām here, itās my next to-do. Iāll try reading some for our next Japanese meeting.
