#2026 progress

2026年３月１日

今日は土曜です。十時半に起きました。そのあと朝御飯にコーヒーと卵のトーストを作りました。食べた後は二時間ぐらい勉強しました。

先週仕事に行きて、ロンドロマットに行きて、後メキシカンのレストランに行きました。ブリートとチュロスを買いました。すごく辛いブリートから、ちょっと嫌いでした。でもチュロス美味しいでした。

映画:

March 1st, 2026

Today is Sunday. I woke up at 10:30。And then for breakfast I made coffee and egg toast. After I ate, I studied for about 2 hours.

Last week, after I went to work and the laundromat, I went to a Mexican restaurant. I bought a burrito and churros. Because the burrito was extremely spicy, I disliked it a little bit. But the churros were delicious.

Retranslating it here to English while reading what I wrote in Japanese, I know there are likely many grammatical mistakes. 😅 I'm especially not confident in my use of 後 (あと) to imply doing something after another thing. Technically, I haven't gotten to that grammar point in Genki 1 yet, but I keep using it when creating English sentences/thoughts to translate as practice so I'm hoping to get more confident in it.

It doesn't look like much, but I did manage to answer the workbook questions with minimal looking up of words, so I'm pretty proud of myself.

Just waiting to get feedback from my tutor, but probs won't happen till our next session which is next Thursday.

But in the meantime, I'm going to try and do some journal entries to practice more this weekend. There may be spelling and grammar mistakes, but hopefully my tutor will be okay checking those during our next session too.

Not sure if the last sentences are more natural as:

Really stoked with how it's turned out so far! Especially since I didn't have a zipper foot or a top stitch foot.

昨日was my first 日本語 の練習 in over three weeks. Because of 忙しい仕事 and joining an evening sewing class at the start of April, I haven't had energy to dedicate to 日本語のべんきょする。 I've barely had capacity to eat decently, keep up with personal relationships and take care of hygiene, to be perfectly honest.

However, this past weekend a friend I met nearly 10 years ago at an environmental conference stopped over to stay with me. It was really great and we had some really good conversations. They were also born in Japan, and will be there when I'm visiting in fall, so it was a really serendipitous reconnection! While talking, they asked if I was at a conversational level and I quickly replied I'm not. Even after about 5 months of studying. Which, I guess isn't "bad" considering I also work full time and struggle with discipline to actually study outside of my tutoring sessions. And they didn't make me feel bad about it at all of course, but it had me thinking back to a video I saw a while back.

Paraphrasing: "Could someone figure out your goals based on the way you live your life?"

If I have this goal of being able to have basic phrase exchanges in Japan by November, am I really living my life to reach that goal? Maybe I'm being too self-critical, but I don't know if that would be the case.

So, in my tutoring session yesterday, we did mostly review and a vocab quiz. I only got about half the questions on my vocab quiz correct 😩 However, with the other practice of forming sentences for review, I did well. And because I struggle to find time for homework during the week, I asked my tutor if we could go back to weekly sessions and I can get speaking practice during session.

So that's what we're gonna do. For some reason I thought I needed to finish learning all 12 lessons of Genki grammar before I could jump into conversation practice, but my tutor assured me that wasn't needed. I already made it to lesson 8, so we're just going to start doing simple question and answers in session from now on and continue learning grammar as part of session every other week.