Today was the second day of the Japanese class, and we hit the ground running.
Most of the practice I’m going to need to do over the next few days is writing. I need to practice writing some of the hiragana, even though I can recognize almost all of them by sight. I can’t really write them. So it’s good practice and I don’t mind doing it. The rest of the stuff is really easy – or more accurately, stuff I already learned – so it’s really not going to be too much of a big deal to learn it. It took me months to get this head start, but I’m rather glad I did. I wonder if I should try to keep it.
I did embarrass myself a little in the class though. The embarrassment was mostly centered around the fact that I heard a few variants in how sensei was pronouncing the words, and I wanted to make sure that I was hearing it right, or if we had to emulate her. On balance, I probably shouldn’t have said it, but whatever, what’s done is done. I kept quiet on quite a few other things, though, and I was right to keep quiet. I decided from the very beginning that I wasn’t going to parade what little I know around, and I’ve been keeping to that – although I’ve also decided to say whatever I can in Japanese, and that is a bit more than most people in the class can say. But that’s kinda the point of Japanese class, so I’m okay with that. Several times today I heard “I have no idea what that means”, but they will. I’m still caught off guard when sensei switches to Japanese without warning, so it’s not like I’m that far ahead.
But today was better than Friday. I don’t think I’ve dealt with the underlying issues I was dealing with, but at least it’s tolerable now. So there’s that. Off to vacation!