Japanese-Learners Homework

It’s been a rough and busy week, and I don’t really have the right mindset nor time to write the next in the “be with you.” translation series. As it is, I am strongly leaning towards writing the translation part of the post for one week and splitting off the footnotes for that post to the following week.

Anyway, what I shall write about instead is the homework for our japanese-learners group. Last week I decided that the group is pretty set on enough grammar and what’s mostly getting in the way of learning more is simply the lack of vocabulary (and other memorized things). The first homework assignment I sent out was to memorize commonly useful conjugations of する and 来る, and to look up the definitions of a list of vocabulary words and memorize them as well (I would’ve provided definitions to people for whom the process of looking up definitions wouldn’t help with the memorization, because I am one of those people).

I came up with this nifty idea yesterday: one of the hardest parts of Japanese is the lack of spaces, so I thought I’d give everyone a block of text in kanji/kana and the corresponding romanization, also in a giant block of text (i.e. no spaces). The task would have two parts: figure out where the morphemic breaks are in the romanization, and figure out how to pronounce the kanji (i.e. match the romanization to the kanji, similarly to how a web publishing/design class was once told to figure out tags for bold and italics by finding the corresponding text in the source markup and looking at what tags enclosed that text). Since not everyone has yet memorized the kana (which y’all should do, ASAP!), I think the first instance of such an assignment would have to be no longer than a few sentences, but I do feel like it would be a useful exercise.

Anyone have comments on this idea, or more ideas for homework assignments besides just memorizing vocabulary lists? I would probably combine the above exercise with the task of looking up the 生字 (shēng​zì​, literally something like “fresh words,” i.e. words you’re seeing for the first time) in the text, which would be one way of making vocabulary-learning more interesting, but more innovative ideas are always good to have!