Nihongo, err Japanese

Tonight, duv and I took our first lesson in Japanese at the community college (we needed a night course– UCSB’s offerings were during our busy experimental hours). We’re really excited– even though the course is just conversational, we’ve bought textbooks and will be working to quiz each other to build vocabulary and learn about verb conjugation. The class is fun so far!

Fun fact- Japanese has three writing systems- Hiragana, an alphabet for native words; Katakana, an alphabet for foreign words, and then thousands of Kanj, ideograms borrowed from Chinese. We’ve just about memorized our Hiragana… Katakana starts tomorrow!

So, why Japanese? Well, languages are neat, and I’ve always wanted to study an asian language… Teisha likes Japanese (and we thought it would be cool to be able to understand anime someday); and most importantly, we’re planning to go to Japan for our honeymoon, so it would be really neat and respectful to try our best to learn a little language and culture before we fly over there.

Seeing the charts of verb conjugation and the sample “Hi, how are you?” conversations in the lessons actually made me yearn to review my French as well…

こんばは！

4 Responses to “Nihongo, err Japanese”

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Who is your teacher?

Ted - September 24th, 2008 at 3:59 pm

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Looking at the schedule, it’s probably Wakita-san. I never had her, but I sat in on two of her classes and she seemed pretty terse. I’ll be interested in your observations when the class is over. 🙂

I don’t know what your plans for language lab are, but I put the lab recordings that we had when I took that class on cabeen.org , in case you don’t want to go to lab every week:
http://www.cabeen.org/Japanese%20Class/

Ted - September 25th, 2008 at 9:07 am

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Thanks for the heads up and linkage! We’re actually only able to take the Adult Education version (taught by Lee-sensei), which is much less intensive (so we have to motivate ourselves a lot more to do workbook and audio book stuff with each other).

Milestone of the day: I can read and write all the hiragana, and say all the “hello, thank you, what’s your name” kind of stuff. Next up, Katakana!

I love languages. 🙂

Paradoxdruid - September 25th, 2008 at 11:40 am

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ahh~~ looking forward to honeymoon already? you always plan so~ ahead.

hope your guys have fun ^.^ I really did enjoy taking Japanese back in my college days

Amy - September 26th, 2008 at 1:11 am

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