Okay, Maybe Japanese When I feel Like It

It takes a lot of energy to write in Japanese, even when all you're doing is typing on a keyboard. Still, you have to think about the grammar, what sounds natural, how would  a Japanese put it, yada yada, and after all Google Translate is really no help. It mangles some sentences so badly that even though I know my Japanese is correct, the translation machine just can't grasp it.

I guess with a language in which subjects are often optional, the computer just can't get the idea of "context" so when you just write something that's typically Japanese, without a subject, like "And often, my students . . ." -- of course, dropping the "my"because I don't need it, because YOU know I'm talking about MY students, as opposed to anybody else's . . . well, the computer doesn't know how to handle that. So it will put something it thinks is correct, like "our" or even "its" (it loves that one, because it gets the computer off so many hooks) which just make the resulting English translation a horror.

At any rate, the topic of this post is that I just watched a documentary, a really fantastic one, about the rather depressing subject of suicide in Japan, but one I think I will make required watching for some of my more advanced students, because it not only is mostly in English, with JAPANESE subtitles, which is a major switch, but because the vocabulary is quite down to earth and not very complicated. Plus, it's done in a typical conversational/polite style which is what we students of Japanese should all be learning, plus it has a lot of those conversational quirks that all languages have, like "y'know," "Ummm," "So then .  ." etc. etc. which are really the key to the back door of learning any language naturally, so this documentary is ideal.

I also found that, just by re-studying kanji as I've been doing in the last two months or so, my reading comprehension level has leaped to unimaginable heights -- sometimes I can read the ENTIRE set of subtitles on the screen, if they didn't go quite so fast.

And if I can do it so can you!

I will download this documentary and watch some bits of it with some of my more advanced students (you'll know who you are) and I think it will give you a lot more bang for your buck than some adolescent animé time-waster.