Listening Goal:
To be able to get the gist of Japanese speech produced at a natural speed.
As a beginner, I have to have people slow down a lot in order for me to understand them. I need to be exposed to fluent speeds more, and to have more practice parsing out the meaning of quickly-spoken speech. I want to be able to understand the general idea of what Japanese people are saying, even if I don't know every word.
- In order to help with this listening goal, every week I will watch one episode of either a Japanese game show, Japanese weekly show, or Japanese news. This will let me hear conversation between real-live people.
Speaking Goals:
To reduce my pauses and have a more natural rhythm.
When I speak Japanese now, there are always long pauses in the middle of my sentences because I am not sure how to finish what I want to say. This goal has two parts: The first part is having mastery of saying sentences (feeling natural with their structure, etc.). The second part is having an actual rhythm that sounds like native Japanese speech.
The second speaking goal I have is to have good intonation. For me, good intonation means that most of my sentences will have the correct overall pitch form. I might not be able to know the correct pitch for every word, but I want my questions to sound like questions, and I want to be able to control how I do the pitch in my sentences.
- For these speaking goals, I will practice shadowing a bit on the Japanese TV shows that I watch (see Listening Goal), and I will also practice with the "Let's Speak Japanese!" dialogues.
- I will also go to office hours once every two weeks to get specific attention on my rhythm and pitch when I talk.
- I will learn a new Japanese song (or poem, if I can find a recording) every two weeks. This probably won't help with pitch, because songs have pitches of their own, but this should help me with syllable pronunciation (and vocabulary).
And here's to a fun year of learning Japanese!
