Japanese Lecture

Tawa Sensei's lecture last thursday was a really good guide in helping me approach Japanese. She mainly focused on beginner acquisition of the language, and fortunatly I fit that profile. Her diagram and the way she explained it really showed me that I'm focusing too much on writing, and not enough on connecting the speech. I can communicate a lot of information from earlier chapters pretty well, but I'm definitely lagging behind my expectations , especially since the sentences are becoming much longer. I was really hoping Tawa Sensei would focus more on mneumonics, specifically the most effective way to move the information recalled through the mneumonics into longterm memory. What I find happening is that while I'm able to recall the word, I still have to use the mneumonic many days later. Wven if I study the word very thoroughly, I find myself in the habbit of recalling the mneumonic, then translating, then formulating the structure of the sentence. This delays actual speaking quite a bit. I did however appreciate her focus on chunking as a memory tool. It's really worked for me (kon sen rai and asa hiru ban combination is a good example), and our vocab book is organized so that you can utilize this tool for almost every vocab quiz.