Classy

Yikes, it's been a while since my last post. But since I've been asked to, and I'm very vulnerable to requests (or, let's face it, orders) behold:

I've started Japanese, after an initial balk at the gate and refusal to attend the very first night. Ahh, anxiety, my old friend. But since then I've been three times and I loooove it. I've started half-way through third year, and I have a lot of catching up to do, mainly grammar patterns and vocabulary relating to travelling (which is not a frequent topic in manga or anime). There are between 10 and 15 people in the class (lots of people have other commitments) and many of them are Australian-born Asians, which means they already know at least one other language apart from English. Fluently. And quite a few of them are Chinese which gives them a huge advantage with kanji too. Grrargh. I'm torn between relief at no longer being the smartest girl in the class, and an overwhelming compulsion to study until I *am* the smartest girl in the class again.

Or, hmm, perhaps I mean most knowledgeable -- the one that everyone else turns too when the teacher asks a hard question.

All of you know what it's like to be the smartest person in the room. It struck me particularly hard on Wednesday night when we were writing some sentences, using patterns that I'd seen less than the other kids, but they just didn't remember. Whereas I seem to be able to see something once, understand it and reuse it, the others seem to be a lot more repetition oriented. I don't mind this at all, because it gives me time to catch up on other things in the mean time. I think I catch on quicker than most of the others because I've listened to and read much more Japanese than them (well, except for the ones who've lived in Japan).

I like my analogy of language acquisition requiring a framework into which new information can be placed. The more you know, the more places you have in your framework to put new words and structures. One of the few things I dislike about the way we study in class is that we often take a task (such as a ringing to arrange a hotel reservation) and learn how to do this particular task very thoroughly. We learn the particular phrases required, how to specify dates and times and so on, but this is a focussed, restricted sort of learning. Where's the love? I mean, where's the bit where we learn how to chitty-chat with people? I want chitty-chat skills dammit.

Ahem. To bring this back to the framework idea, just learning how such one such conversation might go is not very helpful. Far more useful to me would be a lesson from the text book about the various verbs involved in giving and receiving gifts. In Japanese there are (at least) three verbs for "to give" and at least three verbs (though one's usually only used by men) for "to receive". Learning these would be fun, and useful in lots of ways. It's also much more of an insight into Japanese culture and if information was included about the courtesy of gifts, then that would be cooler still. But I guess there's always the chance that I missed this lesson.

I've decided not to do Level 2 of the JLPT. Sasaki-sensei convinced me that level 3 is quite hard enough, so my kanji count is now much smaller and I'm not going to bother tracking it any more.

In other news, well, I don't have any other news. I'm studying a "lot". Oh, except that Emma-sensei and Xopher bought me a tshirt from China and it's lovely and says "Dao" (Chinese), "Dou" (Japanese), or "The Way" (English).