My Reflection for Cycle 1

For my first cycle of shadowing and goals, I was able to meet most of my goals. I shadowed about twice a week, mainly using youtube videos. Shadowing youtube videos was a lot more difficult than shadowing the text book materials. For one of my practices, I watched a few minutes of Powderpuff Girls in Japanese. Because the powderpuff girls are always so hyper, they talk super fast and in really high voices, so it is difficult to understand. However, I picked up on a few words, like sensee and benkyoshiteru, mainichi, etc, so I was able to get the basic idea when matching the words I knew with the visual aid of the show.

As for my Oral Midterm, I overall think that it went well. There were a couple awkward pauses where I couldn't think of any questions to ask, but I think the conversation had a fairly natural flow. I made a few mistakes, like when I didn't add な　in between りっぱ　and たてもの, but I think I did well with my pronunciation. I was a little nervous at times, so I sounded less natural when I couldn't think of what to say. However, the ten minutes went by pretty quickly. I am proud that I can have a ten minute conversation in Japanese after a quarter of Japanese! It is encouraging to know that I have learned so much in such a short time.