☆ENGLISH UPDATE☆

Hi everyone! 

It's been such a while since I've written here in English, so today I will write a brief entry about how I think my Japanese studies are going.

LANGUAGE:

Lang8 is one of my most favourite websites. I have been using it since the beginning of last year and it has helped me improve my Japanese so much! Well, I think it has helped.

In case you do not know about Lang8, it is a wonderful website where you can register for free, select the language you are learning (or languages if you upgrade to premium), and write diary entries in that language for native speakers to correct. In exchange, you correct their diary entries, so as well as hopefully improving your skills, you become part of a wonderful little community of language learners, making friends and perhaps even connections for when you go travelling! 

I believe it has helped me a lot and recommend it to anyone who doesn't have many opportunities to practice the languages they're learning. I have always found it hard to write in Japanese (I still do of course...), but after writing compositions in Japanese on Lang8 I feel more confident, because I can see that what I am writing is being understood (even if it may be quite vague sometimes haha), and I am getting lots of feedback about how I am going.

JLPT Somatome, the textbook series I have been studying is helping me, but I find it very difficult to remember things from the grammar book. Kanji-wise, I am getting through that slowly, as it is something one really cannot rush! The vocabulary book has so far been the most valuable. I find it really well structured and it has lots of useful vocabulary for everyday life! The reading and listening books have been sitting on my desk untouched since I bought them as I want to improve my kanji, grammar and vocabulary before I get into them. Hopefully I will be studying them by July next year haha.

JAPANESE CULTURE:

Well! I don't know what's got into me, but it seems I have gone back to university to continue my Japanese studies! That is, a little imaginary university in my mind! I have written myself a learning contract with a list of everything I want to learn about before 2015.

I am compiling information on the topics I am interested in, from wikipedia and other sources, which I will print out (it's already at 200p...) and study over the next few years. I have chosen a lot of topics that interest me: Japanese history, Japanese pop culture (anime, jpop etc), shintoism, tea ceremony etc. Hopefully I can use this blog to write about some of them, and if you know about the topics yourself, please feel free to join in via the comments section!

Well, that is my overview of my progress over the last few months and my study intentions for the future! I'll try and write a few more posts in English every so often. :)

Thank you for reading!