Now that I've completed the first major part of Japanese 101, it's about time to reflect on how much progress I've made toward the goals that I set out a couple of weeks ago. As far as the pronunciation of the r- and g- mora goes, I believe that I made substantial progress toward a more natural pronunciation. My r- group now sounds much closer to the Japanese pronunciation rather than a mi of English r's or l's. The g- moras are also more natural sounding. In addition, double consonants no longer sound like a full break, but I still occasionally forget and unintentionally break the word. By this point I also feel pretty confident about which vowels are dropped, although it seems that there are some words where both pronunciations are acceptable, and this occasionally confuses me. When doing listening exercises, I am now able to better distinguish the breaks in words, although I listening is still probably one of my weaker points. In making progress towards these goals, I think that my previously set out activities were pretty helpful. I went to the Japanese Language Table every week（おいしいです）, which was a fantastic opportunity to speak in an informal environment and get more comfortable with the language. I've also made some good friends there and enjoy fumbling around with expression that we don't quite know how to say yet. Shadowing was also helpful, but way more time consuming than I had originally thought. I ended up only doing one or two sessions per week, instead of my intended three, but they still proved really useful. Shadowing anime is fun（いいです）, but is also really hard (むずかしいです）, and I was only able to catch certain key phrases that occurred often, or that I had learned in class. Overall, I feel that I kept up with my activities reasonably well, even though I probably should have dedicated more time to shadowing.
Having been really nervous about the oral midterm this morning, I think that everything actually went pretty well. I definitely paused and said um a couple of times, but it was rather minimal and I don't think that it detracted too much from my speech. The parts of the conversation that I was able to prepare went really well, and I was able to express a lot about myself and Princeton's campus. There were a couple of words that I think that I may have mispronounced (としょかん）, but I think that I did well on the whole. I made an effort of being an active listener (ああ、そうですか, いいですね, etc.) and tried to interact as much as possible with my parter and すずきさん. I made several small errors (such as saying どれ rather than これ) but there weren't any major missteps. However, listening proved to be a bit problematic, as I misunderstood one of すずきさん's questions, and spoke about the wrong day. Anyway, I think that I presented myself well, but also learned some places to work on in the future.
あきやすみが だいすきです！わたしは げつようびから どようびまで キャんぷに いきます。
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