2012-12-27, 03:05 AM
@Person above : When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
When I was in high school, I kind of sucked at Japanese at first. I was pretty much the dumbest guy in the class and everyone around me excelled in the language. Come year 2, I studied so much, alongside my Chinese friend who taught me Kanji, and I wound up being at the top of my class. I was so good, even, my Japanese teacher invited me to join the National Japanese Honor Society and the 'Japan Bowl' competition training. The Japan Bowl competition is a nation-wide Japanese language skills competition where students of the same grade level (Japanese grade level, not national school grade level). We studied after school every day for almost the entire school year for it and excelled more than a year beyond what the normal class would've taken us to. Sadly, I didn't get to participate in that competition, because the other kids in my class were genius-level smart and got chosen instead. I still got to tag along as an 'alternate,' though my turn never came up. We didn't win, though. The next year, we had the same after school study session for the entire year, but we never actually went to the competition itself. We just studied and studied. At that point, I became the single best in my class and was actually taking two Japanese classes in a single day during the normal school hours (Japanese year 3 and 4) and I was invited to jump to AP Japanese the following year.
After I got out of high school, though, my studies hit a brick wall. All I've had to use since then has been Japanese MapleStory, which has helped a ton (mostly with refining my conversational abilities, via typing), but it also set me back a ton. I miss high school a lot for that reason alone. I absolutely loved my Japanese classes. It's just with AP Japanese, though... I felt like I didn't really learn much, because we mostly read Musashi (the book about Musashi Miyamoto) for half of the year in English and talked about it/reviewed it in English. We had a foreign exchange student from Japan in the class, though, and when we had Kanji quizes, I even beat her to the punch with the meanings and readings of Kanji. I guess I should thank my Chinese friends for that.
;~; NOW WHO WILL MAKE ME SAMMICHES?
chrome Wrote:How were you able to learn Japanese to the level you're able to speak it now?
When I was in high school, I kind of sucked at Japanese at first. I was pretty much the dumbest guy in the class and everyone around me excelled in the language. Come year 2, I studied so much, alongside my Chinese friend who taught me Kanji, and I wound up being at the top of my class. I was so good, even, my Japanese teacher invited me to join the National Japanese Honor Society and the 'Japan Bowl' competition training. The Japan Bowl competition is a nation-wide Japanese language skills competition where students of the same grade level (Japanese grade level, not national school grade level). We studied after school every day for almost the entire school year for it and excelled more than a year beyond what the normal class would've taken us to. Sadly, I didn't get to participate in that competition, because the other kids in my class were genius-level smart and got chosen instead. I still got to tag along as an 'alternate,' though my turn never came up. We didn't win, though. The next year, we had the same after school study session for the entire year, but we never actually went to the competition itself. We just studied and studied. At that point, I became the single best in my class and was actually taking two Japanese classes in a single day during the normal school hours (Japanese year 3 and 4) and I was invited to jump to AP Japanese the following year.
After I got out of high school, though, my studies hit a brick wall. All I've had to use since then has been Japanese MapleStory, which has helped a ton (mostly with refining my conversational abilities, via typing), but it also set me back a ton. I miss high school a lot for that reason alone. I absolutely loved my Japanese classes. It's just with AP Japanese, though... I felt like I didn't really learn much, because we mostly read Musashi (the book about Musashi Miyamoto) for half of the year in English and talked about it/reviewed it in English. We had a foreign exchange student from Japan in the class, though, and when we had Kanji quizes, I even beat her to the punch with the meanings and readings of Kanji. I guess I should thank my Chinese friends for that.
whybanme Wrote:Zelda is on fire. Now she's dead.
As for my signature, I'm not too sure. It worked and then one day stopped. Haven't been bothered to change it.
;~; NOW WHO WILL MAKE ME SAMMICHES?