Thursday, May 22, 2008

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I'd like to start off by wishing 乾媽, 姨媽, and Melanie a happy birthday! 祝你們生日快樂!

Rundown of classes (each period is 90minutes):
Monday -
1st period (Reading and Grammar) with Kobayashi Sensei who I like a lot. He's nice and funny, so the class seems a bit more relaxed than others might be. Grammar periods we go over the lesson's reading and the new grammar structures that are introduced in the section after taking a vocabulary quiz. We have a grammar outline handout with each structure listed, with example sentences, and also some fill-in-the-blank exercises to help us understand what the grammar point does and how to use it.
2nd period (Oral and Writing) with Yagi Sensei who is nice, but the way she teaches isn't very challenging. In this period, we usually have a handout for some listening exercise we are going to work on for the week. It gives us new vocabulary and exercises to help us comprehend the listening piece (mainly some true/false and fill-in-the-blank type stuff). When we have Yagi Sensei, we usually end up listening to the piece at least 5 times or so. Homeworks will be a task reading with a writing piece to go along with it, or a flat-out essay (pretty short though) and we usually get a week to work on those.

Then I don't have class until 5th period, which is History of Japanese Linguistics. It's absolutely insane. The content is in itself difficult to comprehend, with no linguistics background (words like moraic nasal, bilabial fricative, glottal stops, obstruents, onbin...), and Motohashi kind of expects us to know what he's talking about. Which is also difficult to pay attention to because he has a pretty strong accent and as he talks a glob of really white saliva collects at the right side of his mouth. Anyway, basically everything in that class goes over my head (and most others') but you do get a sense of just how complex Japanese is, though I'm sure most languages are and everyone studying Japanese understands that it's a complex language...but whatever.

Tuesday-
1st period (R&G) with Komine Sensei. She's also very nice and I suppose good for the grammar class, but she moves at a really slow pace. As in, we usually spend so much time going over the reading that we don't get to spend that much time with the grammar outline and much of the exercises are left for homework.
2nd period (Kanji) with Hino Sensei. She's the main person in charge of our level of Japanese. She's little and quiet and the way she teaches the Kanji class doesn't necessarily require much attention. We always start off with a quiz in this class as well on the Kanji that we learned last class (which sometimes is nearly a whole week...) or a test on the whole chapter's Kanji. I usually utilize class by filling out the worksheet, and writing all the Kanji, with their respective readings and compounds with definitions, in my Kanji notebook. She thinks that I find Kanji OK/relatively easy because of my China powers. Sigh. Because she asked and I didn't feel like talking so I said yes. Sigh. But in reality, writing them I don't find difficult because I'm used to how Chinese characters look and stroke order and that kind of thing. But I mean, my Chinese reading skills aren't even that high, so my Chinese skills can only help me so much in guessing what Japanese kanjis mean, and of course the readings are usually quite different (Japanese Kanji have 'onyomi' which is derived from the Chinese pronunciation (used in Kanji compounds), but with Japanese sounds, they may be different than what the Chinese word itself sounds like. Then there's 'kunyomi' which is the pure Japanese pronunciation (used in Japanese words) and these obviously are also completely new to me.)

Then I kill an afternoon until I have dance practice (my genre is hip-hop) from 5-8 pm, and then go home. (More on what dance practice is like later hopefully.)

Wednesday -
Same format as Tuesday.

I also have 'extra practice' for G-Splash Wednesday night, from 5-8pm again, though usually it ends a bit earlier.

Thursday -
Same as Monday, but 1st period teacher is Okamoto and 2nd period is Kobayashi. Okamoto Sensei I find most like Kawai Sensei at UVA. By that, she's quite enthusiastic and likes/wants to have everyone paying attention very carefully, and you rather have to do so because she likes to call on people randomly, and also asks a lot of content-related questions. So I'm on edge the entire period, just as I was for each and every one of Kawai Sensei's classes. But she does a really thorough and good job of explaining things.

Friday -
1st period with Okamoto again, and 2nd period (O&W; we just have Kanji twice a week) with Yagi Sensei.

Then dance practice from 5-8pm, then my weekend starts!

Currently, we're doing presentations in the O&W class; we present on either a childhood game (many of our lessons were spent on how to explain games) or a person. So that is taking up our 2nd periods and we end early. We spent today playing musical chairs and Heads Up-7 Up...

2 comments:

Daniel Andreano said...

Yea I feel okamoto is alot like the teachers at UVa as well. She does the whole 'keep you on the edge' thing really well. I don't know what it is but it seems like all the grammar teachers are having trouble covering everything in an hour and a half lately.

mia said...

@_@ so that's what all of their names are....



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yeaa i agree with Dan about not covering everything. and then the tests come back super late! D: