Learning to Read (again)

Learning to Read (again)

Hello everyone! I have a more fun update for you today. The other day, I remembered something my mom did while I was learning to read. She would make labels and stick them on everything in the house. I remember liking this, so I am trying it for myself.

This afternoon, after school, I went to Staples and bought myself a label maker. When I got home, I immediately set to work. I got out my Anki deck and went through all my cards to find the ones I could use to label the household objects.

Quickly, my house is starting to look like a vocabulary explosion. My fridge now proudly sports a label that says 冷蔵庫 (reizōko), my desk reads 机 (tsukue), and even the toilet has its fancy label, トイレ (toire). It’s honestly pretty funny to see everything labelled like this. I would label people, too, but I’m not sure how happy my brother would be with a label that said いらいらさせる (I’ll leave that one for you to figure out on your own).

Along with what I am already doing, I want to start watching some films in Japanese. As a kid, whenever I was sick, my mom would put on the movie Ponyo, a fantastic film by a Japanese film company called Studio Ghibli. Supposedly, the best way to learn a language is to live in the country where it is spoken (me soon!), and the second-best way is to immerse yourself in as much media in your target language as possible.

All of Studio Ghibli’s films were initially made in Japanese before being dubbed into English, so I think I will start watching them. Another thing I found interesting was that it is not good to watch a show in your target language with English subtitles. There is a concept in linguistics called comprehensible input. To learn a language effectively, your brain must figure out what is being said from the limited amount you understand, and having subtitles defeats that!

That’s all for now! Thanks for tagging along (pun intended)

Bye for now, Max