Irritation.
I don't know what it was that was getting underneath my skin today, but this whole issue of being illiterate really gets on my nerves from time to time. I thought to myself that I was tired of trying to guess what was in front of me and having F read for me when it was necessary and translate. Looking at websites and having to try to do adult pseudo-literacy matching to try to find the specialty I was looking for does wonders for the ego.
So, irritation and frustration, when channeled properly can cause one to put on their big girl panties and deal with it. Dealing with it at the moment makes me wonder when I might be able to find time to join a class. I have the JLPT 3 (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) in December that I seem to be making no headway in studying.
I am quite averse to the notion of going to a class on a Saturday night. Who goes to class on Saturday night? When I could be spending a night at home doing, well, nothing except bathing and going to bed, or wait, eating dinner at the inlaws as we often do on Saturday evening. Hmm...when did I become an adult with nothing interesting going on? Honestly it was well before E made her appearance. I've been dull for years.
I just like to keep my options open, you know.
posted by bethyl @ 3:27 PM
1 Comments:
I find that I MUST be creative when trying to make myself more literate in Japanese. I find this, because:
1. Who WOULD take a class on Saturday night, give me a BREAK?
2. Even if I was the type to take Saturday night classes, I tend not to do well in classes. They bore me to tears, and I don't do the homework because I resent it.
3. Traditional methods of learning Japanese would be fine, if they weren't so traditional. It's the word "traditional" that will turn me off every time.
4. If I had to call myself a "student", it would immediately result in me being a "bad student" and I don't like labelling myself that way.
These are the things that have made me (reasonably) biliterate. They are all tricks. All of them.
1. Karaoke, because I like to sing. Singing really fast also results in you "reading" the words fast. This, admittedly was a trick from when I was single.
2. DVDs. This is a doable trick even with kids. Watch DVD movies in Japanese with Japanese subtitles. It's a slick trick but it works, especially if you love the movie. I love Ghibli. When I was aiming for the Japanese Proficiency test I developed a wider taste, particularly the "Gakko" movies and the TV drama "Kita no Kuni Kara", which is addictive in the best way!
3. Reading to my children. Reading to my husband. When I was studying for the test, I would read to my husband. This was not as irritating as it sounds. That is to say, it is actually MORE irritating than it sounds and therefore can only be kept up for extremely short times before he starts to read to you, the next best alternative. Reading to children is a double edged sword of course because here you are wanting her to be good in English and you're reading to her in Japanese, and that doesn't make sense. Stick to the hubby, perhaps. Really, even five minutes a day makes a difference.
4. Private tutor - this is my exception to the "becoming a student" rule because you can choose the teacher, you don't look bad in front of other students for not doing homework, and you can choose topics (reading topics) that interest you. When studying for the 1-kyuu I worked out of Japanese junior high school textbooks, which were surprisingly interesting (to me, an adult... I'm sure they were boring as all hell to a teenager).
5. Private tutor with someone else - this is my exception to the above rule of not looking bad in front of other students, because often it is very good to look bad in front of ONE other student because it does make you do the homework in spite of yourself. In fact, I had the private tutor with a friend, and the friend was a much better student than I, a fact to which I attribute having passed the 1-kyuu. Had I not been trying so bloody hard not to look like a complete tosser in front of my friend, I certainly would not have passed. I mean, how awful would it have been for one of us to have passed and not the other!!
So, as you can see, in the list above I have tricked myself for a brief period of time into being a student, and if not a good student then a pretty tricky student. Since passing the 1-kyuu, I have let myself slip (a LOT!!!!!!!) but I am so glad I did it, because I am a lot freer now in what I can read and what I can't. I can usually read around the stuff I can't read, rather than the way I was before where I was reading only the one word I could read in the whole paragraph and summarizing around that one word!
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