JLC- Mason Brianna

Reflection: When Sensei mentioned to the class the opportunity to participate in a Zoom meeting with students from Iryo Sosei University I was filled with both excitement and dread. I knew that if my classes would allow me the time, I was going to participate, but I was scared to death about the possibility of embarrassing myself in front of my Japanese peers and their teacher. Still, I knew that if I wanted to get better, I needed to do this. For the meeting itself, Tim-sensei, in Japanese, called on students and asked them simple questions. We then did our best to answer them; some students were able to understand and answer without help while others needed additional guidance. Tim-sensei used variations of language, gestures, and facial expressions to get his meaning across and the other students also tried to help. It was also funny to see our own Sensei mouthing answers excitedly in her screen. In the end, I feel that it was such an enriching experience. While I did feel like my h...

This year has been one of struggle but also a lot of success. My previous semester of work led to me achieve ding a 4.0 GPA and being inducted into the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society, and it also allowed me to get one step closer to my goal of joining KCAI's foreign language honor society. I have confirmed a fair amount of diagnoses and have strengthened my bond with my physicians and learned to better understand my body's needs to function, and above all else, I have continued to try my best at learning. I started this current semester in January, extremely unconfident in my skills, barely able to form basic sentences or read anything other than hiragana and a handle of kanji, and I feel that I have progressed so much as a language learner. Even though I am still incredibly self conscious about the way I speak and being put on the spot, I can now, if given time, put together information that makes sense and can get a point across, and I am proud that even when I was feeling lik...

 TO A FUTURE ME: I hope that ten years from now, you have accomplished what I have not yet. I hope that you have completed or are in your years of fellowship and enjoy your life as a doctor. I wonder if we've chose orthopedics or rheumatology, or if something has completely changed us like what happened in 2017 and are doing something that I cannot even comprehend right now. Maybe you decided to go back to KCAI- I really miss KCAI... Maybe you decided to become a teacher? Or not, I really have no idea where you'll be. Either way, I hope that in these ten years, we have gotten our health under control and we have figure out what works for us emotionally, physically, and spiritually. I hope you aren't yet jaded by the world. I hope that you've fulfilled that promise you made to Suyung that we made an hour ago about visiting Japan together. I'm expecting you to look back at this experience and portfolio with fondness because in the end it made you who you are- for bett...

「竹瓦温泉は古いです。建物は１８７９年を始まりました、でも今は建物は１９３８年を始まりました。」 Reflection: Working off of last class's skills, today I spent time reading, translating (to the best of my abilities) and summarizing a work centered around Beppu. Since there was a larger, varied topic choice in this piece of text compared to the last piece on sushi, I definitely found myself struggling more to keep up with the vocabulary and grammar. For this, since the set up was more sentence-based than labeling, I had to take a different approach to try and figure out what was being said. It wasn't as straight forward as copy and pasting full words and being done with it. First and foremost, I found kanji that seemed to be repeated in multiple areas and looked up the meaning of them to get a general sense of the overall theme; then I procced to use the generic sentence structures to isolate other kanji, katakana and verbs. This helped be guess which words might be more important and then be able to look those up as well. Aft...

  Reflection: Today was much different than other days in class because we finally started moving through larger chunks of unfamiliar texts for interpretation. The material included a informational book about types of sushi, ways to eat it, and the specifics about where it comes from and where it is popular. I especially enjoyed today's tasks, even though I found the sheer amount of information a bit overwhelming simply because I have had previous experience as a sushi chef and therefore have had some  exposure to some of the terms we had to learn today. Since I could pull up past experience, it made the whole thing just a bit less scary, though no less daunting of a task. Since I haven't had to really explore large blocks of unfamiliar texts since I was very young, it is really hard for me to compare the two ways I need to get through assignments like these. I don't really remember how I used to so I can only go off of how it is recommended I do it now: using Jisho and Web...