Blog 4 – Keana Sabin

Posted by: Keana Sabin | on December 2, 2014

When I was young, my parents made the mistake of only teaching me English rather than their natives tongues, Japanese and Tagalog. Because of school I had to learn a language and my parents pressured me to choose between the two languages. I chose Japanese.

Just like any other language you have to learn the language’s alphabet. Before learning Kanji, I had to memorize Hirigana, then Katakana.

http://16991978arwuws.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/i132831034_93948_52.gif

To remember hirigana and katakana, my senseis would play videos to help us remember. Like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plvSpVSdJWU

Japanese seemed easy because you learn simple phrases and words like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYiEcPEZS2U

My opinion Japanese changed when I noticed the grammar is quite difficult to remember. I had a hard time remembering where to correctly place particles within my sentences. If it wasn’t that there’s certain ways speakers must structure their sentences to either appear polite or passive, or express past or present.

http://learnjapanese.com/grammar

It’s also really important that words are pronounced correctly otherwise they could mean something else or just sound weird to native speakers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QU34Rw-hF64

When taking Japanese classes at SDSU, I noticed lesson plans weren’t as simple as the ones in community college. SDSU teachers expected students to remember and write skits about holidays, customs and apply certain etiquettes (like in the links below). You only learning so muhc in class…Not having enough knowledge of certain vocabulary and sentence structure really made it difficult making a legitimate script that correctly corresponded and expressed presentation topics. Half the time my fellow classmates didn’t understand what was being presented.

Japanese bowing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdlNZJ_TFXU

White day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxtT9lK2rIs

It wasn’t skits we had to write essays. Japanese essays aren’t written left to right but rather right to left.

Examples:

On the right it goes title and then name and whatever you have to write about. Indenting is needed in particular areas.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/joannablack/2494295168/

http://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/~tyabe/jpn03/items/genkouyoushi.pdf

Other things about Japanese:

Among the languages spoken around the world… Japanese isn’t one of the top spoken languages. The top spoken languages of our world is English, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic and German.