Tag: study

1564: Study Resume

Japanese classes started again this evening. I was a little nervous about going back, as I frankly haven’t done as much independent study as I intended, but I was pleased to discover that I had actually retained a fair amount of knowledge — including, to my pleasure, a significant amount of the hiragana and katakana character sets required for basic reading and writing in Japanese. (We haven’t looked at kanji at all yet; that’s something I’m saving for when I’m thoroughly familiar with the kana sets and basic sentence construction — I’m getting there.)

So, if you’ll excuse me practicing for a moment…

はじめまして。わたしはピーターです。(I had to look up how to spell my name in katakana, but now I know. Yay me.) どうぞうよろしくおねがいします。

わたしはさんじゅさんさいですそしてジャーナリストです。わたしのかぞくはよにんです。ちちとははとあにとわたしです。

Or, you know, something like that.

It was actually a rather interesting lesson this evening as there was a second native Japanese speaker in the classroom for the second half of the session. Our teacher is a native Japanese speaker herself, but the addition of a second person — who, naturally, we all had to introduce ourselves to using something similar to the phrases I clumsily (and possibly incorrectly) constructed above — added an interesting dynamic to the mix. She was a teacher, too, so she was evidently well-versed in the clumsiness of English people attempting to speak Japanese, and thus supported any unfamiliar words and phrases she used with plenty of gestures and the like, allowing us to discern the overall meaning of what she was saying even if we didn’t quite know the exact words or would be able to recreate the sentence ourselves.

Language learning is really interesting. Despite my joking with school friends about German lessons slowing time down (I swear, those lessons always felt like they were twice as long as every other class at school) I actually quite enjoyed gradually picking up an alternative means of communication. Of course, the one time I went to Germany and attempted to speak the language to a vendor, they responded in perfect English, much to my chagrin. Now, school German lessons are literally half my life ago and I haven’t retained a huge amount of knowledge; the German I still know today is pretty much limited to Zug um Zug (the German name for the board game Ticket to Ride) and proudly singing Essen mein Scheiße whenever university music friends get together. (Don’t ask… and yes, I know it’s gramatically incorrect.)

Japanese has the added interestingness of not only having to learn a completely new spoken language with completely new grammatical structures — actually quite a bit simpler than English in its basic form, though I’m aware I’m still very much at “beginner” level — but also a completely new written language, too. Sure, German had umlauts and whatever the ß thing is called, but Japanese doesn’t have anything even vaguely recognisable. And those things that do look like English characters are almost inevitably something else. You think ヒ might be “t”? Wrong, it’s “hi”, unless you write it ビ, in which case it’s “bi”, or if you write it ピ, in which case it’s “pi”. Obviously.

I exaggerate for comic effect; knuckling down and actually attempting to translate and read these characters gradually burns them into your brain. I was delighted to find myself able to complete a revision sheet using entirely hiragana earlier this evening; granted, it was considerably slower than if I just wrote in Romanised characters, but in the long run it’s going to be beneficial to get as much practice as possible using the kana characters. And, when the time comes, kanji.

I’m currently torn on whether to continue classes in the new academic year, though — assuming a more advanced class is actually running, which I don’t know as yet — or simply to study myself. The book we’ve been using in class — Japanese for Busy People — has proven to be a well-designed textbook with plenty of good supporting material (the Kana Workbook in particular has been invaluable in drumming those characters into my mind) and that is suitable for both classroom and independent study.

Either way, though, this is something I’d like to take further. And who knows, it might even push me in the direction of a new career one day. But that’s a long way off as yet. For now, then, おやすみなさい！

#oneaday Day 917: Select an Ability to Learn

I like learning stuff. It’s a fun process to start from “nothing” and gradually equip yourself with Knowledge. I’ve done it a number of times over the years, though I will admit that I’ve not taken any of these things really far enough to, say, get a qualification. But I do have a working knowledge of HTML, CSS and several specific software applications that I didn’t know before, all thanks to my ability to self-study.

The trouble with self-study, though, is that it requires time — time that you don’t always have — or time that you might not have the inclination to spend “working” when there are nicer things you could be doing.

It’s when I think about this sort of thing that I wonder what it would be like to go back to university. I’m pretty sure there are a lot of people I know who look back very fondly on their university days, but that — assuming they went at 18-19 — the actual “studying” part of things isn’t the main reason for the rose-tinted spectacles. I know it’s certainly not true in my case — while it was a lot of fun to, say, get up on stage in a nice concert hall and perform music, or sit in a small room and argue semantics with a group of fellow English students, the things I remember most fondly are the extracurricular and social activities I did. Theatre Group and their various productions. Trips to the Edinburgh Fringe. Drinking in Chamberlain Bar. That time my friend Plummer came down and we got wasted on the Union’s £1 triple vodka and oranges then consumed roughly a pound of cheese between us at about three in the morning. That time a shopping trolley showed up in our flat so we mounted a huge clandestine operation to get rid of it without being identified.

Now I’m a little older, I can’t help but think that going back and, you know, doing it “properly” might be fun. That said, the possibility of shenanigans is also appealing. Andie and I were discussing this the other day — university is one of the only times in your life when you have pretty much all of your friends together in one place, making it an absolute snap to arrange impromptu social events. Nowadays, I don’t see my friends anywhere near as often as I like, and it’s sad. But I digress.

Yes. Doing it “properly” might actually be fun. Picking a topic, studying it, doing assignments, getting graded, improving. Learning something. Coming away from the experience with both practical experience of applying subject knowledge and an actual qualification to prove you’ve done it. Sounds pretty good to me. If I had the opportunity, I’d study something practical that I know very little about — probably something computer-related, since I’ve always been IT literate and willing to tinker about, but my actual specific technical knowledge of things like, say, programming is rather limited.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty unlikely to happen any time soon. Going to university is very expensive, and I don’t see myself surviving on the relative pittance that is the student loan any more.

That said, I do have a work-from-home job with flexible hours and good pay.

Hmmm.

Hmmm.

No. No, I can’t do that. Not just to satisfy some sort of whim or early-30s crisis or whatever it is that’s going through my mind right now.

What I can do, though, is take some steps to learn something new on my own time. Self-study. Perhaps signing up for some sort of evening class. I’d like to do it, certainly, it’s just a case of finding — or perhaps making — the time.

Now, what to learn…?