Comments on: Another learning draught

By: caughtredhanded

caughtredhanded — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 05:33:10 +0000

I can just imagine pouncing on some, unsuspecting Japanese party, only for them to turn on me like a pack of wolves, and beat me over the head or something! I think, in light of this, I'll stay well clear.. You're right though, downtime is pretty key, and I do find also that when I'm 'practicing' to myself outside my the controlled boundaries of my lesson, I probably learn a lot more. It's like anything: you never learn how to do something until you're actually doing it. Very philosophical, ne?

By: rainbowhill

rainbowhill — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:28:05 +0000

Enjoy the festival for sure, there are bound to be some adventurous Japanese in the crowd. Seek them out like some crazed language exchange fanatic. But seriously though, what Chris says about the unstructured time is most important. Even though I lived in Japan so I had it all around me, I felt best about my study when I turned the afterburners on and went for it in the down time and the in-between times. Even if you don't have any flash cards or study materials with you, just learn to recognise this time for what it is, free from other peoples' demands on your attention. When you know what time is, and you have managed to couple it with your learning goals then you'll really feel the burn.

By: caughtredhanded

caughtredhanded — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:57:00 +0000

Sound advice. I particularly like your point about the packaged 1 hr stints. Of course, Japanese is never going to be textbook (which is what I was referring to in the first paragraph), I know that, I just hate getting behind that's all. I'll be taking a couple of manga with me to the festival, so that should keep my brain ticking. Cheers!

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:34:38 +0000

Take a book with you, a manga or whatever and read it on the train/bus/in the car/days you're not at the festival, don't worry about not understanding it, its good reading practice and if there's lots of pictures, you'll get the gist of what's going on. Make it a textbook if you want.
You've got 14 days between one lesson and the next, Glastonbury isn't 14 days long, so you've got loads of other time to read or do whatever other studying. If you ever live in japan / use japanese 'properly', it's not going to come along packaged up into nice little 1hr bundles once a week, it'll be everywhere, so get used to having it at non-specified times.
Don't worry about missing things, because you will, no matter how hard you try, just accept that you'll get another chance to get it.