Joe Auricchio

Once again, I’ve procrastinated myself into a terrible place. I have a Japanese midterm at 10am this morning, with part two on Tuesday afternoon. I’ve put maybe five hours of study into Japanese this quarter, four of them tonight.

I have to learn four grammatical constructs. Two of them—honorific language and humble language—are similar in mode of operation: modifications to verbs based on the subject’s relation to the speaker. The other two are also similar—postfixes to verbs with only one character difference between them. Speaking as a cognitive scientist in training, their similarity means it’s easy to confuse them without extensive practice. That means I’m screwed.

I have to learn a few dozen vocabulary words. We’ve had three vocab quizzes on subsets of the list. I missed one quiz outright. For the other two, I “studied” by cramming the night before and morning of the quizzes. Without repeated practice, I have no actual retention of the words. So I’m starting from scratch again now. After the midterm, I still won’t remember them, which will burn me again on the final, and burn the worst someday in the future when I have to actually use the words in conversation.

I have to learn thirty kanji: their pronunciation, words containing them, and their English meanings. Thanks to StudyCard Studio at least I can drill these easily. But twelve hours is just not enough time to learn.

Oh, and I have to do listening. This is probably my worst area. Since I rarely watch anime (FMA at Scott’s is the first I’ve seen in quantity since… May?), the only listening practice I have is an hour a day in class. Even then, I’ve noticed I’m no longer listening, I’m only hearing a few words and guessing at the meaning. I’m sure there are first-year Japanese students who can rock me at listening. Cogsci time again: listening and understanding a language is something only practice can bring. Unlike math, heroic mental effort will not help you. Knowledge of writing and reading will not help you—they are completely separate skills. The brain needs practice hearing and interpreting the language. Practice I lack.

I shouldn’t be in Japanese 20B. Christ, I never learned 10B properly. The difference is, the ten series was an easy A or a zero-work B. The twenty series is not kidding around anymore. It’s too late to switch to P/NP this quarter. I’m already down in points thanks to missing a quiz and a few lectures.

On top of all this, I don’t know if I can even go to Japan fourth year. I don’t know if I can even responsibly continue taking Japanese—I need all the classes I can take. I’m already looking at a solid six years. Japanese might mean a major sacrifice… such as a minor in CS (which I’m seriously considering). Perhaps I can’t do it at all. I need to figure this all out, and soon.

But instead of, gee, I don’t know, studying, I’m writing this blog post. I’m listening to the Lovedrug CD I got at the concert yesterday (I should have been studying last night, too). I’m fighting with AppleRecords.jar to download as much music as possible from shared iTunes. I’m talking with friends on Jabber.

God I’m an idiot.

Jump to Step 7 and run till completion.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 13th, 2006 at 02:36 and is filed under Doing, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.