25 February 2007

Bad weekend for traveling = good weekend for Japanese.

Due to my tireless dedication to school I managed to spend about 8 extra hours in airports this weekend, which means I got lots of studying done for Japanese. I missed my flight to Denver on Thursday because I was meeting with a professor, so I had to wait for the next one, four hours later. Last night I went to the airport and waited on standby for four hours to get on the redeye, because I was concerned that my flight later this afternoon would be canceled due to foul weather in New nfrYork. So I made a big dent in this week's vocab and started on some katakana as well. I also started a new method for studying Chinese (reading characters instead of Pinyin) which is really slow right now but I'm hoping will improve fluency later on. I am constantly making more work for myself.

So the test was really LONG. I think I've hamstrung myself at the moment by doing all my studying in hiragana, as my brain just doesn't translate that fast into hiragana yet. Unfortunately I haven't done the equivalent studying in Romaji, so if I wanted to write in Romaji I would have to translate everything into hiragana in my head, and then into Romaji. Wow, that would take a long time. Again the hope is that this will lead to more fluency later by eliminating a translation step in my brain, but for now it is slowing me down terribly. I barely finished on time, and, from my experience with Chinese, I'm sure I made some translation mistakes. Rats. I'm hoping for rapid improvement in fluency. If anyone has any recommendations I'd be glad to hear them. (If you write in Hiragana though, I probably won't understand.)

Well I suddenly have this gift day in New York with no plans, and I certainly don't want to spend it blogging. We'll see how far into the day I can make it with approximately three hours of airplane sleep.

1 comment:

mayura38 said...

こんにちわ、TaのShioriです:)

I'm sorry to hear that you missed your flight. 8 hours must be long and make you nervous. I've missed my flight from Miami to NY. At that time, we could not get any new flight b/c of the busiest season (Spring Vacation). We ended up waiting for more than 10 hours. We were so afraid that we might have to stay up at the airport:(

Btw, the transration process must be frustrating! Because I am still struggling with it in English, I totally know how you feel!! I don't know how to get a rapid imprvement in fluency.....so...I'd be glad to hear any recommendations, too :o