Revisions and reflections on goals and activities

Goals:

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.

The reading speed has been improved over the semester with assignments and practices

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. 

I am happy that I have learned some basic grammars. Although kind of rusty, but more practices will help me to get familiar with grammars.

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”. 

Getting there. More practices required.

     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.

 Still trying, but the real speaking speed is still way too fast for me to do shadowing.

Activities to achieve the goals:

1.      Practice writing writing/reading katakana 30 minutes a week 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.

      Revised to 2 times a week. One is at the day before the PE recording, the other is the PE recording.

3.      Learn simple but useful vocabularies 30 min a week from an app on my smartphone. This app provides simple vocabularies as well as useful sentences for beginners.

      

4.      Actively correct my pronunciation by repeating speaking after 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.  

Still working on it.