Japanese Learners

We had our first meetup of the group of people interested in learning Japanese (moira list: japanese-learners; blanche yourself on if you’re interested!) last Monday, before the SIPB meeting. There were four of us: two reasonably advanced learners and two newcomers to the language.

The two of us who were reasonably advanced went over some basic expressions (different ways of saying “hello” and “goodbye”), the kana and romanization idiosyncracies and things-to-know, and a few tangents occurred here and there (like 吹く(fuku, meaning “blow”) to 服 (fuku, meaning “clothes”) to 河豚 (fugu, meaning “pufferfish”/”blowfish,” commonly known for being a delicacy in Japan)).

We seem to have decided upon Saturday afternoons from 2-3PM as our weekly meeting time, but obviously if there’s some conflict for multiple people some particular week, the meeting will shift accordingly.

Next Saturday, which hopefully everyone will be able to make it to (we have seven people who are reasonably committed to coming, as far as I can tell: three experienced and four newcomers), I’m planning to have the two newcomers who came to the last session get the two newcomers who weren’t able to come to the last session up to speed, and the rest of us will sit around and correct them and/or make more tangents as we see fit. After all, the best way to learn is by teaching, right? And seeing as I’ve already taught some of this material several times (twice for “Learn Asian,” and once for “Introduction to Japanese”), someone else ought to take a crack at it. Also, I’m lazy and bored of repeating myself. And who knows? Maybe someone will mention something that I never thought of mentioning.

Saturday is so far awaaay … so, we’ve commandeered class “nihongo” for speaking in/about Japanese between sessions. If you’ve any questions, bring them on! Answering them is good for us. And when we have conversations in Japanese, feel free to ask for romanization (if you’re lacking unicode support) or a translation (and an explanation of the translation as follow-up, if needed).

Anyway, our mission is to help each other better our Japanese, so join us if you want to learn or if you’ve been looking for people with whom to practice!