School blues

Today will be my third day of Japanese class. Honestly, I'm a bit jaded about the class. I find the teacher nice but a bit less than stellar in her teaching style. The first day was so terrible that I began to question perhaps dropping the class. It's taught in what I guess you'd say is a very "conversational" style. Which means that it's taught by spending five minutes showing you fifteen kana, ten minutes making you play an odd form of bingo with your classmates using these kana that you don't actually know and the rest of the time learning daily phrases rapid fire and "roleplaying" interactions using them with your classmates where you pretty much read lines from the board because the line you've just been taught has been mushed up with the last ten you just learned and you can hardly keep them straight. Suffice to say, if I'm learning anything from this class it's from self study. And I can self study without paying $400 for books plus tuition and four hour round trip bus rides thank you.

I think it's just a question of learning style. I expected Japanese class to go like my Spanish classes did. Give me run downs of sentence structure, teach me a handful of verbs, nouns, pronouns etc, teach me conjugation and allow me to ... you know, learn to form sentences. Instead I feel a bit like a parrot, spotting off lines who's use I know but who's meaning I do not. I know how to chat idly about the weather with someone but I have no idea what the individual words in the sentence mean. And without that knowledge, I'm not really learning Japanese am I? I think I was looking for something a bit more achedemic and a bit less hands on.  Frankly, I feel I'm wasting my time and that since most of what I'm learning I learn by teaching myself I'm also wasting my money. 

I'd say that it's worth it to have a native speaker to teach you pronounciation and such but I have two advantages on that. 1) Brit has taken years of Japanese classes and is quite good at it so I have an in home tutor. 2) I watch a CRAP LOAD of sub titled anime and don't have any problem understanding how sylabyls are pronounced.

I think I've learned more Japanese memorizing the lists of useful phrases most players in Final Fantasy XI learned. Knowing how to chat about the weather is going to be as useful to my goals of understanding Japanese media as knowing how to say "You can pull another. I have enough MP" would be. 

I feel lost in the class very often. But it's an odd sort of lost, I'm a good student and a natural achedemic. I'm not use to not knowing what's going on. But apparently giving me a stream of sentences who's meaning isn't solid in my mind other than "This is how you say "Thank you for last week. Here is the book you loaned me. Thank you." and then asking me to interact with a random stranger as if it were they who loaned me a book is a recipe for me feeling like I haven't learned a damned thing. Also, my level of learning seems directionally proportional to my interest in the subject matter. I am very interested in learning to understand Japanese. But with the teaching style and the direction of the class I end up throwing my hands in the air and feeling like "Who cares?". Which isn't condusive to learning. I'm going to come out of this only knowing hiragana, which I will have mostly taught myself because as said any time spent on them in class is rapid introduction and review of what you were apparently suppose to have taught yourself over the weekend. 

Maybe I'd feel a bit less bitter if going to a 4pm -6:30pm class didn't involve leaving home at 1:45 and getting home at 8:30 ; ; 

Kitchen Princess Vol. 6

Ugh! It took me so long to get my hands on this volume of Kitchen Princess. I read most my manga from the library. Seattle's public library actually has a really vast amount of manga so it feeds my habbit much farther than my wallet would take it. And I avoid the crazy weeaboos who live in the manga isle at Border's so bonus! The downside is how long I have to wait sometimes for books, especially if it's a popular series. For example, I'm number 27 or 34 people waiting for the 18 copies of Kitchen Princess Vol. 7 in the city. That'll be a while.

Anyway! After the cliff hanger at the end of volume 5 I was a little disappointed with how this one went. The whole series can be a bit vapid but dealing with the death of a major character in such a breezy way didn't sit right with me. And the reaction of the other students didn't wring true either. Daisuke's sudden change of priorities and immediate loss of distain for whatever it was he hated his parents for was also less than stellar. Throwing in yet another plot twist and cliff hanger at the end made me toss the book into the air with a "Feh!" and curse my interest in soap opera shoujo like this. But I'm still going to read the next volume ... for the some reason that I've watched Clueless dozens of times. I have a weird attraction to mindless candy.  I'd probably enjoy Kitchen Princess more if I weren't reading Fruits Basket at the same time. Reading a stellar shoujo while reading an average one makes the latter feel worse than it really is. 

It's been a crazy busy few days with little time for gaming or anime. I'm finally, after SEVEN years of being out of high school, getting back into school seriously. The problem is I only decided this about two weeks ago and classes start next week so I've been going a bit nuts flying around getting financial aid in order and leaping through all the loops that colleges like to throw at you before they let you attend. However, as of today I am done with everything and free to start classes next Thursday with my first Japanese class. I couldn't be more excited.