Blog Musings

I suppose what makes a good blog depends on what the purpose of the project is. In my mind, the primary purpose of it is to have a network with which to share thoughts and sticking points that we've developed in the transition to a relatively difficult language. When I learned Spanish, there wasn't nearly as much of a total reinvention of how I express myself as it is with Japanese. It can be difficult to change the way we think, but I also find it fascinating how different it can be. In some ways, it's a much more streamlined and intuitive language; in other ways, not so much. For instance, I find the thought of having different conjugations being used to convey different levels of respect counter-intuitive and needlessly complicated, but I'm sure Japanese people learning English find themselves asking "what is the point of having verbs conjugate differently depending on the subject?", and they'd probably be right, too. I find myself feeling the same way about Kanji. It just seems to me like the language would be so much easier if everything were in Hiragana, although spaces would have to be used to be able to read anything, but I can't only imagine how overwhelming it must seem to try to deal with the Roman characters somehow being pronounced differently in every word that they appear, sometimes not even being pronounced at all. Having people with whom to discuss things like this can sometimes make things make a little more sense, or at the very least make us realize that at least there are others to share in the misery.

It can also help the strength of our class as a learning group to see each other as more than just a string of Katakana followed by "-san." A little bit of personal revelation in the blogs can make it easier for us to get to know our classmates, opening up the avenues of communication more and allowing for us to help each other more easily, whether by actually helping with the subject matter or by making the class more enjoyable.

By my interpretation of the blogs, then, the important things to include in a blog are primarily to discuss what our overall observations and problems with learning the language are as well as any significant events in our personal lives that seems worthy of sharing. It appears to me that one of the possible pitfalls would be to simply use the blog as, well, just a blog and posting about their day and skipping the subject of Japanese almost entirely. Although some people may enjoy doing that, I'm sure that's not what Sato-sensei quite had in mind with this assignment.

I took my cookies out of the oven before I started writing this, so they should be done by now. いまクッキおたべます。おいしいですよ。