First Japanese Lessons

Papa P and I have begun our Japanese lessons! We each get 150 hours of language training! We both were matched with teachers in Michigan and we are doing lessons via Zoom. 

Papa P's first lesson was last Saturday morning. He talked in Japanese for two straight hours about a variety of topics. I don't believe I have mentioned that he speaks Japanese--he lived in Japan for two years doing missionary work before we met. He was exhausted afterward, but we still had Saturday chores to do. 

My first lesson was Monday. It was also two hours long, which was crazy because I had already worked an eight hour school day! I haven't mentioned it before, but I took Japanese for two years at the same school where our kids took Saturday Japanese lessons when we lived in California before Papa P's job moved us to Texas. This is not our first relocation with his job, but it is our first international move. Anyway, I digress. 

Trying to recall things from five years ago was difficult for me. My sensei wanted to see where I was level wise and answer in Japanese. It was sooooo difficult! She also had me read in Japanese. Japan had three wrting systems: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana is a syllabery system where a character represents a syllable such as ka, ki, ku, ke, and ko. They look like か、き、く、け、and こ.  I am pretty good reading hiragana. The 2nd system is also a syllabery, but they use it for foreign words. So the same sounds look like this: ヵ, ｷ、ク、ヶ、and コ. I did terribly with those, so sensei wanted me to practice those for homework. The last system is kanji. It's the complicated characters that can be a whole word in a single character or several characters.  日本 is how you write Japan. 

The last thing I did in my two hour lesson was review essential phrases in Japanese. She wanted me to read them in hiragana to practice my reading, even though the romanized version was right there (and waaaaay easier and tempting to read!) The romanized version uses the alphabet to represent the words, such as Nihon is how you would write Japan romanized instead of using one of the other writing systems. Nihon is how you say Japan in Japanese. 

My sensei will be sending me a textbook that includes two CDs. So old school, lol! After my first lesson I felt tired, but ok. I even went out for an evening walk with Papa P and went to bed later than I should have. 

The next morning, however,  I woke up not knowing what day it was and wondering why I was so MENTALLY EXHAUSTED! I was wondering why my alarm went off and thinking it MUST BE Friday or Saturday! I was sooooooooo disappointed when I realized IT WAS ONLY TUESDAY!!!