Jul 10, 2012

Learning the Japanese Language

Language has always been important to me.

I have been listening to Japanese for 12 years. I took a class in Japanese in my second year of high school.
But I've had mixed spats of study in the realm of grammar and verb conjugation , ect. I've taken a few university courses and went to Japan while in Art school. Long story short Japan and its language has always been a part of my life in some way.
Now I live there and am feverishly trying to improve what little I do know of the language.

What I lack most is practice in speaking. But this is also complicated by my weak grasp on taking what I know and adding grammar and new vocabulary to the right situations in a timely manner.

So while my speaking confidence is low, my listening confidence is much better and I can generally listen to someone talk in their native speed and manage to provide the right combinations of responses so that they can continue trusting that I understand what they have said. In reality, I maybe understand 40-50% of what they have said depending on the topic. Having been living here for the last nine months I have picked up a lot but not nearly enough as I would have liked.
I have heard from people who have gone on before me that it generally takes three years to get to conversation level. But they studied hard everyday. I'll talk more about this another time.
A strong bridge between two people (or more) is the language they speak. This is a metaphoric bridge (located in Toyokawa, Toyohashi-shi, Aichi-ken, Japan.

1 comment:

  1. That's not a metaphoric bridge, it's a real bridge!