Third Assessment of the Year- August 2021

There has been very little that has happened regarding language since my last assessment in May, but as is customary for the beginning of the school semester, I want to take a look at how I've changed, even if it isn't much.

Last January I restarted my journey in learning Japanese, and at that time I had felt like I was entirely out of my league and that I would essentially ruin my grades by being unable to keep up with the class. Despite that, however, I made it a priority to not push myself past certain limits and try and grow as a language learner simply for myself. What ended up happening was much better than I could have hoped for at the time, and besides bringing me joy when I was struggling with stress from other courses, my work by the end of class helped me realized that a big portion of my I lacked confidence was an uncertainty of my abilities against my peers' and something I might now call shame of what I thought was failure. 

Even though I still struggled with that concept at the end of last semester (and still do at times when having to speak), the break over the summer and sudden dunk back into a class setting has helped me realize today that I have grown quite a bit. Funny enough, it wasn't our project over Tohoku, or placing second twice in competition that gave me more confidence- it was downloading the Duolingo app for class and being able to guess works I had never seen before and retain them. Simply seeing the word for 'bird' and understanding what that meant brought me a lot of pride.

This semester, my goals are to continue to improve that pride and confidence in myself, and hopefully be able to learn more vocabulary to expand my ability to converse with my peers in whatever settings that come up! I also want to work of developing relationships with my peers this semester and try and be a little less scared of embarrassing myself. My personal experiences in the past have made me a little jaded in my opinion, and I wanna work on becoming more open and patient with myself and others. I feel as though the goals below are the next best step to achieving this!

Specific Goals:

1. I want to be able to understand (or at least piece together) the overall concept of Japanese spoken at a more natural pace. 
2. I want to be able to read larger pieces of text at a time without getting overwhelmed.
3. I want to feel comfortable speaking outside of the classroom with friends who are starting to learn Japanese.
4. I want to better express myself in less formal language when typing to others in Sky.
5. I want to work presenting information about myself.
6. I want to be able to write about events with more varied verb usage.