JLC- Mason Brianna

 For this project, we were to watch two videos and reflect on whether or not we agree or disagree with the speakers!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0yGdNEWdn0&t=4s  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_XVt5rdpFY Reflection: To really get my thoughts out for this project, I really had to think about things. Both speakers made very valid points, and I was surprised to find that the first video, about learning a language in six months, matched up to some of my previous experiences to a scary degree. I especially appreciated the idea of relevancy that he talks about. Even now, after so long, there are certain ‘beginner” aspects and vocabulary that I struggle with remembering, like things to do with time and small talk. I was always frustrated that more simple things would completely slip my mind but harder topics, like with the Tohoku project last semester came much easier, but it makes sense when I think about my use into every day language and how much more interested I...

おすしパーティ (Sushi Party): In this story, the author is giving step by step instructs on how to put together a hand roll, including what ingredients you can use and how to prep said ingredients. This book's genre centered mostly around food, but I would also consider it to be daily life and a photobook with its use of photos. The use of photos and bullet points help separate information and repetition of common words help with memorization.  私の子犬マオマオ (My puppy Maomao): This story is about the author's puppy, Maomao. It gives the puppy's background, like when he was born and his heritage, his temperament, the name of his favorite stuffed animal, Pluto, his love of tug of war, and some other events in his life. This book mostly fits into the genre of animals, but like the previous one, can included photobook and daily life. This book relied on larger pieces of text, more kanji, and photos.   Reflection: Both books I read for this assignment had a high usage of photographs to help...

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 ...

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...