日本ごの ほんせい に

With the beginning of December comes the end of one goal cycle and the beginning of the next.  Over the past month or so I focused on improving various aspects of my listening and pronunciation.  Whenever I learn new vocabulary I now make a concerted effort to memorize the pitch pattern along with the meaning of the word.  I think that the strategy of focussing on pitch from the very beginning has proven fairly successful, and I feel that I make fewer vocabulary related pitch errors now than I did at the time of my last reflection.  Similarly, paying close attention to the way my 先生 pronounces vocabulary in class, and how the models pronounce specific words during dialogues, has helped me to train my ear to the correct pitch pattern of vocabulary.  In addition, I believe that I've made significant progress toward avoiding the rising pitch of an English question.  I discovered that I was doing this primarily when I was uncertain about vocabulary or sentence structure, and was saying the sentence almost as a question of whether or not it was correct.  Regularly going to office hours has proven a great way to remedy this issue, as I have the chance to speak in Japanese for extended periods of time and am called out whenever I make this mistake.  Doing shadowing regularly has definitely helped out with the pitch patterns for vocabulary, but it has also really improved my comprehension speed.  I am now able to gather a lot more information from a fast conversation than I was previously.  Finally, going to the Japanese language table is a lot of fun, and I really enjoy the informal setting to practice speaking and listening.  It's amazing the amount of material that we cover in this course, and having now started on new verb forms and sentence structures, I feel that we're really beginning to dive into the details of the language.  Writing in Kanji also makes me feel super legit.