日本語のじゅぎょの感想

On the first day of class, since this was 1st Year Japanese class, I thought that everyone in this class had no prior experience in learning Japanese. To my amazement, many of them, actually, most of them, were very experienced, they had already memorized all Hiragana and could speak a little Japanese. Even if they were not that fluent, they could genuinely communicate with others in Japanese.

Prior to classes, as Chinese, I supposed that I would have an advantage in learning this language since Japanese was more similar to Chinese when compared to other languages😈; but it turns out that I was wrong.

My biggest problem was that I could understand it when people were speaking, I get what the mean and what they were trying to convey. But when it comes to writing and reading, I was lagging far behind the rest of the class. In class, when teachers showed us flashcards of Hiragana characters, everyone could shout out the pronunciation of the character almost instantly, but when the teacher called upon me, all I could do was stare at the card with a puzzled look and say "すみません、わかりません" (sorry, I don't know). 

I spent almost 2 weeks in order to memorize and be confident in writing all Hiragana. I finally felt that I was not lagging behind. But, it turns out that I got rocky too early. Once I thought I had caught up with the rest of the class, we started to learn about verbs and Katakana. Katakana is certainly a nightmare. Yesterday in class, when the teacher said 書いてください (dictation, please write), I felt a chill down my spine.

Till now, I am still only confident in writing and reading the first 15 Katakanas (ア〜ソ). Unit test is coming up in a week, hopefully by then, I would be able to familiarize myself with all materials taught in the first few weeks of classes.