In health and in sickness, Cycle 1 reflection ...

Well, with this, half of the semester is officially over. Crazy! すごいですね！Anyway, the oral midterm went well enough. さとうせんせい ...　ええと ... すずきさん was totally quiet and shy and his presence totally made ヴォーさん and I forget our outline, but whatevs.. I think we did well. At the very least, it was quite fun - とてもたのしかたです！ I think my language use was ok... I used a lot of vocab, but at one point ヴォーさん called Frist ふるい and then I said it was あたらしい as well, but since I have no idea how to say parts are old and parts are new (the dining part is a new annex), it sorta made it seem like I didn't know what the adjectives meant.. oh well. I feel my pronunciation was mostly ok, and it sounded Japanese-y to me, but I have a head cold, so what do I know? The absolute hardest part was transitioning back to our dialogue after すずきさん interjected some thoughts and questions. Certainly I'm not quite ready to be thrust into the middle of しんじゅく. I definitely still need to work on flow and overall rhythm as well as active listening. But I think I made some pretty good progress for 6 weeks. Of course, I'll have all this dashed when I get my grade on １１月７日.

And now for my Cycle 1 reflection in はいく:

It came and then went
Too quick for all that I planned,
More shadowing next.

I did everything I had planned except for one quite notable exception: I did none of the extra shadowing assignments - どうもすみません、しばたせんせい！I will try to get to some over あきやすみ. Watching the anime was quite fun, and now that I have a little Japanese under my belt, I can recognize words (or parts of words) every once in a while. I also went to まついせんせい's office hours twice (meant to go three times, but got stuck in lab one きんようび) and にほんごテーブル once. All of that was certainly helpful, and I feel much more comfortable speaking Japanese now than I did speaking Italian after a full semester of it. I think the best anecdote (true story, happened こんしゅうのげつようび) I can provide is as follows (and is related to food, although tangentially in that I had just left D'Angelo's Market with some mozzarella, prosciutto, and a baguette for dinner):

[scene: わたしはダンジャロマーケトのそとにいました。わたしのともだちのダリオはわたしをみました。]

わたし：ダリオ！コメスタイ？
ダリオ：ベネ、ベネ。マンジャプレスト？
わたし：はい。

I answered an Italian question in Japanese! Of course, I proceeded to do the same thing again in a couple minutes... well, if that's not proof that I'm learning Japanese, I don't know what is...

I'll conclude this post with another story ... I'm not the only one in my house learning Japanese right now. わたしのねこもにほんごをよみます。Of course, she reads through shear osmosis. ねこもまきのせんせいのほんがだいすきです。