1375: Desu

A few weeks into my Japanese evening class and I’m enjoying myself. There’s been a fair amount of stuff I’d managed to pick up naturally simply through watching anime, playing games and looking things up myself out of curiosity, but it’s nice to know that I was at least correct in all of these cases.

I’m finding the process of learning enjoyable. It’s been a while since the opportunity to learn something in a classroom-style environment — and no, I don’t count teacher training days — and it’s good to get back to it. I can’t help but feel that, having chosen to do this, I’m appreciating it far more than if I was obliged to be there at, say, school or even, to a lesser extent, university.

It’s also enjoyable to be in a group where there’s a decent mix of abilities. I know first-hand how frustrating it is to teach a mixed-ability group, but it’s quite satisfying to sit in a room with other people and be able to tell — this sounds bad, but what the hell — that I’m not the worst person there. In fact, so far I’m feeling quite confident in my own abilities with regard to pronunciation, remembering phrases and so on.

The part that’s doubtless going to be somewhat more challenging is the learning of the Japanese characters, beginning with the hiragana set. I can remember a couple of “sets” of these without too much difficulty, but others are a bit harder to remember — and it takes me time to parse them into the syllables they represent. I’m sure that’s something that will come with practice, but it’s my one real stumbling block at present. It’s not a massive problem since the majority of the initial work we’ve been doing is in romaji rather than kana, but I rather optimistically picked up the textbook the course is using in its kana incarnation, not realising that it pretty much expected you to have both hiragana and katakana pretty much sorted by the time you start learning words and phrases. I may have to invest in the romaji version for at least the early weeks — that or spend a bit more time doing self-study on hiragana and katakana, anyway. It’ll come in time, I’m sure.

So far we’ve only learned a few basic words and phrases — introducing ourselves, saying good morning/afternoon/night/bye, giving our phone number — but things seem to be moving along at a reasonable pace, and the class is working well together. I still feel a bit nervous about interacting with relative strangers, to be honest, but I’ve been going for three weeks now, including talking to people, and haven’t exploded or shat myself or anything like that, so that’s good.

I’m interested to see how far this initial course takes things. I’ve certainly got the taste for learning again, so may well end up continuing my studies once it finishes in January — or perhaps that’s the time to switch to self-study. We’ll see. Either way, I’m enjoying myself at present, and hopefully it will prove useful (or at least vaguely bragworthy) at some point in the near future.