I took Japanese 305with Maken Sensei in the Summer of 2022.
I wanted to take a class between the two main semesters so I wouldn’t loose what I had been building with Kaneyasu Sensei for the past two semesters.
This class was from May 16 to June 24 and was held on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
I loved having so much in-class time per-week for Japanese. It forced me to use Japanese at least 3x a week for 3 hours a day. What I needed at this time was forced input time, and forced output time. This class focused on conversation skills, not exactly grammar or vocabulary. How do you rephrase what you want to say, with words and phrases you already know? This is still difficult for me, but It helped me to actually use what I learned!
This class had AMPLE speaking exercises. Everyday we spoke 2 times, for about 5 to 10 minutes each with each other. This gave the class a relaxed, friendly feel, which really helped make people feel more comfortable to make more mistakes, which facilitated learning together. We also had a Japanese exchange student, I was lucky to get Kodai-kun who was visiting the ODU campus for the year. We had 2 recorded conversations. 1 for 15 minutes, 1 for 30 minutes. This was a lot of fun, but I was nervous both times.
Blog / Journal
The main homework we had for this class was a blog that we wrote for each class, as homework. We would write it in our own words, then sensei would review and suggest more natural ways of saying things, and we would reflect on that journal.
It was fun to see and feel the progression of my blog getting more interesting, and more natural as class progressed.