School Diary Part 7

And once again a week is over. That means once again I had my japanese class.

Already the 7th day. Nearly half is done. When I look back what we accomplished so far I am really disappointed. We are slow as a snail.

We started lesson 3 today. The schools website said we would finish lesson 7 at the end of classes. More than half to go but more than half of the time remaining. The beginning was slow because everybody had to learn hiragana symbols from zero and for some people it was hard. Because hiragana “ki” doesn’t resemble its romaji counterpart.

But now everybody has a good speed at reading and gets a bit more fluent in recognizing the hiragana symbols.

Wow we are learning!

The vocabulary is still unnecessary and not useful for a language beginner but we take what we get.

Lessons 3 has a celebrity introduced to us. Pierre Littbarski, a former football player from Germany shows us how to ask for what time it is. That is useful! Yes, finally something useful from the textbook. Way better than learning what secretary means at this point.

But wait. We learn the meaning of the word “meeting”  or “conference” as well. Never stop a running system, huh?

After everything is read for a million times and all questions are answered we are doing some exercises. They never are really hard. Read a sentence and replace the underlined part with something new.

On the next page was a useful information. We learned the japanese translation of the weekdays, the months and the day of a month.

We didn’t get to do really much and we have to do 4 1/2 lessons in 6 weeks. I do not think we will accomplish our mission.

At the end I raised my geek level once again after I corrected the teacher. She mistook the katakana word for party and read the katakana word for department store instead. Not that I want my fellow students to learn wrong katakana symbols!