Going over old ground

Today I had a chance to re-study some grammar that I must have first studied about two years ago. It was worth it. I have been using the grammar incorrectly for the past two years.

Lately, my company has been offering free Japanese and English lessons to staff to encourage communication in the work place. I took up the free Japanese lesson gladly, and quit the school I was going to that was costing me about $30 an hour.

I was a little dissapointed to find however, that I had been demoted from an intermediate student to a beginner student again, and was asked to purchase the second Minna no Nihongo book despite the fact that I had already finished the third in the series.

I figured this was down to a bit of mis-leveling and maybe I'd ask to move up a class after a couple of lessons if I found it too easy.

On the contrary it has proven very useful, and enjoyable. The grammar we looked at today was the は and は combination that is used when you are comparing things.

For the past two years or so, if I wished to compare something, I would say something along the lines of 私は新宿が好きです。でも池袋がすきではありません。　Apparently this sounds unnatural to a Japanese speaker. A little hard my teacher said. The sentences are perfectly correct, grammatically, but 私は新宿は好きですが、池袋は好きではありません sounds much more natural.

This was probably explained to me two years ago, but it may have been lost under the weight of all the other vocab, particles, and Kanji/Hiragana/Katakana I was trying to deal with.

I think a study environment where about 10-20% of the material is new to you is really the ideal situation. In the early beginner stages of learning a language this is difficult: everything is new so if you were to only work with material that provided you with this 10-20% it really would be very boring. However, I do think there is a tendency—there was in my case anyway—to run ahead and try and cram in as much as possible as fast as possible.

I can remember when I first started studying Japanese I was dying to get onto that intermediate book, I couldn't bear being on the beginner book. It was just so basic and childish. I wanted to be in the intermediate stage, chatting about stuff like the recession, and global warming.

Well, you know what, I've been into the intermediate stage, and studied from  an intermediate book, and I still can't really talk about the recession or global warming that well. In fact, as I've noted, I can't really compare stuff that well.

So maybe it's a case of the hare and the tortoise. If I'd taken my time with the beginner stuff a bit more, I might well be ahead of where I am now.