Goals and Activites

Goals:

As a beginner in Japanese, my goals for this semester are very simple:

1.      Increase my reading speed on hiragana/katakana. As for now my reading is still very slow, and thus I can’t speak Japanese fluently with this slow reading ability.  I think my speaking can be improved with better Japanese reading.

2.      Understand the basic Japanese grammar. Without knowing the correct grammar, I feel it is very difficult to say a sentence naturally, because I focus too much on the grammar. I will have to be much more familiar with the grammar to speak naturally. 

3.      Learn useful and functional sentences/vocabularies for daily uses. After all, my goal after this semester is to survive in Japan.  I will need to learn how to ask questions using “What” “When” “Where” “How” and “Who”.

4.      With my Japanese improved over time, I hope after the semester, I can do an animation shadowing. I have to admit it is extremely difficult to do animation shadowing with my current Japanese proficiency, but I really hope I can at least do a 1 minute animation shadowing after this semester.

Activities to achieve the goals:

1.      Practice writing writing/reading hiragana and katakana at least 15 minutes every day to get familiar with them day by day.

2.      Practicing shadowing from “Shadowing. Let’s speak Japanese!” at least 3 times a week, with 20 minutes each time. The difficulty of this material is closer to my current Japanese proficiency and thus it would be great to start from it.

3.      Learn simple but useful vocabularies 15 minutes every day from an app on my smartphone. This app provides simple vocabularies as well as useful sentences for beginners.

4.      Actively correct my pronunciation with the help from Google translate.

5.      Select a animation shadowing on Blackboard as my final goal of this semester, and then try to learn the content and pronunciation every week.