Time for a quick study update! It has been 4 weeks since I arrived and how have things progressed thus far? Well, it’s complicated.  As I expected, everything was all very challenging and a bit overwhelming at first.  Coming into a new class that was half way through a course was difficult, but it was the lack of a solid foundation and effective study tools that really tripped me up.

When I was doing self study, I could do things at my own pace and skip through things that were uninteresting or too difficult at the time.  However this leaves gaps in your knowledge and will come back to haunt you later, such as when that point you skipped becomes the basis of a more advanced point of grammar.  So unless one has an iron discipline (that doesn’t sound like me) then you end up building a proverbial house with bricks missing in random places. As you can imagine, this past month has seen me making a lot of bricks!

In my work as a technologist, I’ve found very few situations where wrote memorisation is very useful. With technology changing continuously, it is more efficient to get a grasp of the principles and fudge your way through with the knowledge that everything will be different in 2 years anyway.  However while it might be possible to apply these ideas to language study, you can’t get away from the fact that the more words you know and more grammar you have internalised, the better you will be.

A study and no play makes Matt… a better student

So there is that aspect, where I’m playing catch-up on kanji, grammar or vocabulary that I didn’t memorise sufficiently, but there is also the process of efficient study as well.

As children, we get many years of repetition and immersion to study our first language. As adults we try to condense learning a new language into a shorter period, all while thinking/acting in a different modality.  Since doing it as an adult is a different approach, you need different tools and support structures to get you to your goal.  Which is what I’ve been going through, a process of discovery with over the past 4 weeks.  A lot of this is from other students and the rest is through the necessity of keeping up with the relentless stream of new knowledge we are expected to learn.

This is very much a developing topic for me.  I’ve got a handle on certain aspects and still struggling with others, but the overall trajectory is very much positive.  I’m very curious how I’ll feel 2 months from now…