こんにちは！

Here is a list of my goals for Japanese learning:

1. I want to speak with more fluidity and stutter less while speaking. Often, even when I know what I'm trying to say, I have a hard time getting the sentence out because the sounds are very foreign to me. I think I just need to be more comfortable with the sounds generally so that they become part of my muscle memory. The more I speak, the less I will stutter. My plan is to read a Haiku aloud everyday. Hopefully, by practicing speaking new words, my Japanese will sound smoother overall.
http://jti.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/shiki/beichman/BeiShik.utf8.html
http://www.carlsensei.com/classical/index.php/author/view/1

2. I want to work on the rhythm and pitch of my speech. My sense of pitch has never been very good so I found the exercises that involve identifying pitch patterns to be particularly difficult. I feel myself getting a bit better at matching the rhythm of Japanese speakers (though of course I speak much more slowly), but I'm still having a lot of problems hearing the intonation contour of words. In order to improve, besides doing the listening exercises I'm going to listen to a podcast or the news in Japanese at least once a week.
http://newsinslowjapanese.com/
https://www.youtube.com/user/NewsInSlowJapanese

3. I want to work on remembering and formulating sentences more quickly aloud. Even when I know how to articulate something/have the grammar and vocabulary to articulate something, I often flail when I'm actually in conversation and have to conjure it up immediately. Under pressure, I forget a lot of the Japanese that I should be confident saying. I hope to go to the Japanese table at least once every three weeks. This will help my conversation skills and improve my ability to think on the spot.

I think all of these goals will also be achieved my attending office hours as much as possible and listen to music in Japanese (I particularly like Shintara Sakamoto!)

Thanks for reading!

こんにちは！わたしはのなまえあんあです。あめりかじんです。わたしはにゅよくの ぶるっくりんです。 ぷりんすとんだいがくの にねんせえです。のせんこおわひかくぶんがくです。ありがとおございます。

おはよおございます

I'm taking Japanese because it is my hope to one day read Haruki Murakami in Japanese. He is one of my favorite writers and I feel that reading his work in its intended language would be amazing and a completely different experience. I know that I would need to study Japanese for many years to achieve this goal but it is one of driving ideas that has led me to sign up. Last year, I shopped Japanese and loved it but felt too overwhelmed by my whole schedule to continue taking it. Though it probably would have been too much work with the rest of my course load, I did still feel sad that I hadn't been able to continue and so this year I've made the time in my schedule. Comparative Literature is my major so I hope to study Japanese in comparison with French (the other language I'm learning for Comp Lit). When I spoke to the Comparative Literature Department about whether these two languages would cohere well, they said that contrasting these two cultures and their writings would be rich and interesting and they suggested continuing this path.

What I found most exciting this week was writing Hiragana. Though my hand writing is not beautiful and the strokes do not come naturally to me, I love looking at the final product. It's so much more exciting to write than roman characters.  The most difficult thing for me so far has been memorization of what the phrases mean. This kind of memorization is typically very hard for me, so I create my own mnemonic devices, which I will get started on soon. I've loved these first couple of classes!
Thanks for reading!

じゃあ、また