This week, we started the Hiyaku Textbook. I can’t judge a book by its cover, but this one surely has an aesthetic one.
This textbook is intended to initiate the transition from beginner stages of learning Japanese to the intermediate stages; it is written mostly in Japanese, only providing clarification in English when it is essential to understand a given grammar point. Flipping through Hiyaku and Genki II side by side, one can immediately notice how much less roman script there is in any given chapter. If it can explained in Japanese through example rather than be intellectualized in English, it will be.
During this first week using Hiyaku, I honestly didn’t notice much of a difference between Genki II and Hiyaku; most of the learning happened during actual class-time (which was always exclusively in Japanese anyway), and the textbook was mainly used for homework and class-prep. Nakata-Sensei warned that it would a big jump from Genki II, but I guess it felt smaller than the leap I made in between my Japanese class at Williams and the program initially. The amount of Kanji I was studying increased surely, but it felt like a logical progression. I would study perhaps 18 Kanji every 2-3 days in Genki II, whereas in the same time frame I might study 20-24 Kanji in Hiyaku. The amount of grammar structures also increased, but it felt like we were putting new structures together from grammar we already knew, so it was stimulatingly intuitive. Vocabulary, however, did increase significantly per chapter. I’m not sure if it was just me, but I found memorizing the vocabulary to be pretty tough, simply because some of it wasn’t used much in conversations we were having in class. Some of the vocabulary (in my opinion), simply helped me get through the assigned reading with a good understanding of it, but wasn’t used often during class. In this way, I think the immersion of being in person in Kyoto would have helped; perhaps it would have come up in discussions with classmates outside of class, or when studying together.
Lastly, I finally felt good about having a conversation with a Japanese student! Hatai-san is a Kyoto University graduate school student, and is pursuing environmental studies with a focus on sustainable energy. Though it was a fairly elementary conversation (about daily routine), it was a fun one to have. We talked about how he plays football, and what his routine is like being grad school student who plays a sport on a team and works part time, and what some things are he really values (like taking a walk every morning).