PE Goals

Alas, it's time for me to stop making baby noises while I pace around my room, practicing Hiragana and annoying my roommate, and to start forming actual Japanese words.  The sounds and intonation in Japanese are very different from those in the two languages I currently speak (the other one is Spanish), so this might be a very long and rocky road.

Goals:

-Focus on glides (you know, the や,　ゆ,　and よ combined with the き,し,ち,に,ひ,み,り)  because to me they sound oddly interchangeable with the non-glides and the glottal stops (my approach to glottal stops right now is to abruptly stop speaking and then continue 2 seconds later, which probably isn't the way I'm supposed to do it)

-Intonation will be tricky because it's not something I would naturally do, but I'm hoping my background with music will make this a somewhat less arduous process

Methods

-Start watching anime!  I'm going to solicit recommendations from Japanese friends and then try to shadow the more normal characters, so I don't come out of this sounding like a wizard or a villain

-Talk to real people who speak Japanese (I found some!  They really nice!) whenever I can

-Listen to Japanese music and follow along with the lyrics (I love music, so this should be relatively painless)

こんにちは。...

...is just about all I can say right now.  "Hello."  I primarily speak English, but I can also communicate in Spanish (at the level of a small child), Matlab, and Java (though I can really only talk to my computer and other programmers with the last two).  Although I studied Spanish for 7 years and probably could've placed out of most of my language requirement with it, I opted to start from scratch with Japanese 101 freshman year.  I wanted to try something completely new for reasons I can't quite pinpoint.  When I talk about my Japanese class (which I do quite a bit), my friends usually say something along the lines of "how brave!" but I know they're really thinking "idiot."  I understand the sentiment; languages are certainly not my forte and I've been struggling to memorize even just the alphabet (albeit a lot of the alphabet all at once) when it seems like my classmates either already learned it or are coasting right through with their eidetic memories (ohhh, princeton, I can never tell with you).  Nevertheless, i think it will be incredibly neat to speak a language that's completely different from English and it will be even neater to show up my many bilingual friends--most of whom speak Mandarin or Korean--in at least one Asian language.