いま

いま　は　にせんじゅういちねん　の　じゅうがつ　の　むいか　です。　もくようび　じゅうにじにじゅうにふん　です。 (I wish I could say that I did all that from memory)...

I want to talk a bit about where I am w/ にほんご。

I am loving the language so far, and am excited that I'm able to read characters randomly and recognize Japanese phrases spoken by にほんじん around campus.

First, some background: わたしは　ドイツご　を　よねんせい　から　じゅうねんせい　まで　べんきょしました。 (I can use -ねんせい for grade school, right?)

Things I'm good at so far: sentence structure and よみます- Japanese- when it comes to syntax, word order, and structure- I've found to be much easier than English or German: even though it's annoying to know all the different markers (と、に、は、を、へ,etc) it makes understanding sentences easier, and allows for switching sentence order to be less confusing. After learning ひらがな, reading is really easy: another good thing about Japanese is how each character combination always stands for the same sound- if you can say it in Japanese, you can spell it, and vice versa: the same can't be said for German to some extent, and is very true for English

The things I still need a little work on: speaking and writing- when I see 'り', I automatically think "oh.. that's 'ri'." However, when I see/think 'ri', I don't always think, or it's slower to think "ああ、　’り’　です。" Understand? Also, as I've already said before, my English handwriting is pretty bad to begin with (I taught 2nd graders over the summer, and some had better handwriting than I), and I'm pretty bad at drawing, so all this translates to some pretty ugly す、む、ね、お, etc.
I still get tongue-tied whenever too many し appear in a word (どういたしまして, しつれいします, etc), and my speaking in general is too slow: I already speak slower English than is normal for a native speaker, and Japanese is spoken much faster than German and English (not enough hard consonants), so I may be doomed to forever speak like a Japanese child...

Things I still need alot of work on: listening and vocabulary, but especially listening. I didn't have this problem at all while learning German: my writing was poor (too many grammatical rules) but my listening comprehension was great- I think that this is because German also uses stress/unstressed for speech whereas Japanese uses flowing words with only pitches as differentials.
My biggest hindrance at the moment is vocabulary- some words come easy (びじゅつかん、　おきます、　たべます、　せんせい), but others escape my grasp no matter how... medium (I must admit, I haven't tried that hard yet) I try (としょかん、　ゆびんきょく、　とります) (if I misspelled/you don't recognize the word, it's bc I once again got it wrong... >.< also, I'm not ignoring everyone's suggestion to make flash cards- I just need some time!). Not knowing my vocab further exacerbates my listening fail, since my brain stalls when I don't know what a word means. Also, I'm disliking the fact that verbs (and their negations!) come at the end of sentences... I had the same problem with past participle in German: I can't know the purpose of the sentence until knowing all the other little details!

All in all, I love the language and culture (and my せんせい！) and, barring a tight engineering schedule next semester, will continue on to First Year Japanese 2 (いちねんせ　の　にほんご　に　ですか。).  My biggest concern is trying to avoid slipping into German in class (is it weird that when I don't know the answer, impulse tells me to say "ich weiss nicht" faster than "I don't know"... also I keep trying to say "von- bis-" instead of "－から、－まで"). Something in my brain is saying "Hey, this isn't English... dann muss ich eine andere Sprache benutzen (I'd better use a different language)..."

My goal this weekend: Learn to tell time! Something about learning a foreign language has rendered me unable to read analog clocks, and remember things like the fact that October is the 10th month of the year... Also, gotta learn all those yellow dates! がんばります！