How I Study Japanese

AKA: Much more random and much less planned than Leslie's usual entries.

The one thing I desperately want to get out of this job is a passing ability in Japanese. I know I learn best in an immersion setting, so I'm trying to make the most of it.

I like to think I'm tackling Japanese on all fronts.

1. Most obviously, through listening. Listening to people around me, listening to television, listening to the radio...basically, drowning myself in sounds. It's my best way of learning, so I do a lot of it. This leads to some negative side effects, like saying things like a middle schooler instead of in a mature, adult way, but oh well.

2. Through formal studying. JET has a pretty decent, correspondence-based textbook for Japanese. It's a little scatterbrained in order, but I'm glad to have it. (Plus, it's free!)

3. Through email. I get a kanji emailed to me every day, and I write it down in my kanji notebook. (Kanji = some 3,000 Chinese characters that have been adopted into the Japanese writing system. They have multiple pronunciations [the character for "small," for example, can be pronounced "shou" or "o"] and are hella complex to draw.) It's great for showing off to my teachers/students, even if I don't learn them all as well as I should.

4. Through manga (comic books). While I read everything I run across, just to prove to myself that I can (even if I can't), it doesn't get me a whole lot of sentence structuring. (Most of the time it's stuff like "Ramen!" or "Curry!") My best reading practice is through my slow progress through Japanese comic books. I don't always know the vocab, but the pictures help a lot, and keep me from being too discouraged. Also, the sentences tend to be dialogues and fairly short, which is easier for me to understand than a novel would be. Plus, a lot of comic books have furigana (phonetic-alphabet spellings of the kanji pronunciation), so I can learn more about kanji this way, too.

5. Through forced communication. Many of my teachers and my students don't know enough English to communicate well. I force my students to listen to my English, even if they can't say what they want to ask me in English. I force my teachers to suffer my attempts at Japanese, 'cause it's good practice, and, well, it's the only way I get to talk to anyone at my elementary school. ^_^

6. Through writing whatever I can in Japanese. In my teaching planner, I write my teachers' names in kanji instead of roman characters. I even write the class numbers using kanji, even though the only place I've seen those used instead of the roman ones has been in traditional-style restaurants. It's awesome practice, despite the fact that I'm sure it looks worse than a 1st grader's scribble to my teachers.
I really do try to use kanji as often as possible, as that's one of the most difficult aspects of Japanese. I may never know all of their pronunciations or be able to write them well, but at least I'll be able to get meaning out of what I see.

7. In class. When my teachers explain an English grammar point to the students, it's often in Japanese, so I can glean Japanese grammar by listening and taking notes. My teachers find this hilarious, but it's really helpful. (Plus, it keeps me from being bored during what would otherwise be ALT downtime.)

That's all I can think of right now. I spent most of my day learning Japanese (I went through three days' worth of lessons in my Japanese textbook), and I picked up a few new manga, so learning Japanese has been on my mind a lot today. o ^_^ o