Onsen Reading Analysis

「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. After doing this, I was able to get a general overview of the information presented and draw conclusions about what was being told.

The major difference I found for this particular assignment was that when writing my summary in Japanese, I found myself having to rely on the new vocabulary that I learned and simply rewording it into the sentence structure that we have been using this semester already and into more of my comfort zone. Since it was not just new nouns, but also verbs and different particle usage, I am definitely not as confident in my ability, and there is a struggle without having a second opinion on my work.

I believe this exercise will help me in the upcoming project for Tohoku simply due to the increased exposure to having to sift through unfamiliar material. I also think that it showcases my interest in mimicking and adapting verbs and varying complexities of sentence structures. I'm looking forward to practicing more in the future.