Yesterday I felt like things did not go well because the context was not right for learning (they started right after getting off screens). But, I also felt like I had not put in anything for spaced repetition, which was one of my teaching goals. Yesterday, I was barely able to get them to write down one character on each page when I introduced the ha row. But, this is, perhaps, because each new set of characters was new, inside a new language, with all those anxieties. So, a good time to notice that, and give them something familiar.
Today I gave them the original worksheets with the a and ka rows, characters they had done a few days prior. The girls got going with it and wrote out, without prompting, each character several times. I’ve been telling them to write each character three times, but they had not done that, and this time, maybe because they knew them from a few days ago, they blasted through them, and corrected their own mistakes. It was so awesome to see.
One subversive tactic I had was that doing this in a group would pull in the stragglers. I was hoping that peer pressure would make it harder for one kid to opt out. That kid has generally been my son, who has not had a lot of interest. But, seeing the girls participate had him pull out one of the sheets on his own. And, in a few minutes he had a great question:
“Dad, why is fu (ふ) in the ha (は) row?”
It’s a great question, and allowed me to explain how Japanese has very different sounds, and very different understanding of the way to categorize sounds. For example, in the Japanese brain, ha and fu are similar sounds. Looking at them with an English-speaking brain, you wouldn’t think that. But, they are similar in the way our mouths form to make the sound. And, I explained that ra and la don’t really exist in Japanese. In Japanese, you have a sound that is in the middle, and is like making the ra sound, but touching the tongue to your teeth for just an instant, unlike the la sound, which presses the tongue to the teeth for a longer time.
This led to a funny story. I asked the kids if they recalled the park where their grandmother lives, where we used to hunt for fairies in the massive redwoods. They couldn’t remember, so I prompted them with “laur…” and my son finished off with Laurelhurst. It is a funny word, because it is about the most difficult set of sounds you could ask a Japaneses person could try to make: four L sounds and a hu sound, none of which exist in the spoken Japanese language. So, our exchange student when I was one years old had a hard time, as my dad used to recount, when he had to say the name of the park he lived next to for a year. Good memories.