posted 2006/08/22 at 21:35
For those of you who had problems reading http://www.seanshannon.org/jp/, I should have specified that you need Japanese language support installed on your computer in order to read it properly. (Then again, I'm concerned that even those of you who have Japanese language support may not be able to read it because of the different ways there are to encode East Asian languages.)
Basically I'm going to use the blog as an excuse for me to keep my Japanese skills up. The .org/jp (or whatever I choose to call it) will NOT be a Japanese-language version of this blog. (For one thing, my Japanese skills are still very limited.) Instead I'm just going to write about my life and my thoughts as best I can with what little Japanese I already know and whatever I manage to pick up this semester. In a linguistics class I took last year I learned how differently the brain works when you're reading a foreign language and when you attempt to communicate in it, and how foreign language teaching tends to focus too much on the former and not enough on the latter. I hope that this helps me to keep my Japanese fresh, and gives me an incentive to keep learning the language even after I no longer have to do so for class.
For those of you who are yourselves learning Japanese, I hope that the blog may be of some use to you for reading comprehension if nothing else. I showed the blog to my Japanese professor earlier today, and I'm thinking about suggesting trying to start some sort of electronic penpal system with Japanese students in the process of learning English. It was surprisingly easy to set Blogger up to do a Japanese-language blog, so maybe some of my classmates will be interested in doing something like this. We'll see.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon