Pronunciation Exercises: Mid-Term Reflection

Since the semester is half over, it's time to reflect on my PE objectives, and possibly to revise them. At the beginning of the semester, I started out with one main goal for this year: to speak and understand speech at a natural pace. Honestly, I can't really tell if I've been improving at this or not; relative to my classmates, I've still been lagging behind significantly at both speaking and understanding speech. In order to achieve my goal, in my last PE post I laid out four methods for improvement:

1. Attend office hours every week.
• Well, this didn't happen. Over the course of the past six weeks, I went to office hours to practice twice; that's a success rate of 33%. In other words: failing.
2. Watch one episode of anime every day, paying close attention to how the characters speak.
• This, on the other hand, did happen. Watching anime is fun, so it wasn't hard to keep up with this objective.
3. Attend the Japanese language table at least once a month.
• This also didn't happen. In fact, I haven't been to the language table at all.
4. Review vocabulary every day, saying (and writing) each word several times to drill the proper pitch pattern into my brain.
• This happened for about the first two weeks of the semester, until most of my classes began to pick up the pace. Then, as it fell from priority, it gradually came to a halt.

Just as with last semester, for the first half of the semester, I haven't done so well with sticking to my goal; as assignments and other obligations piled up, I just fell behind. However, like last semester, I intend to get back on track now--coming off of a refreshing break, it's a good time to start clean. I'd like to keep my goals and objectives the same--with the possible exception of #4 (for the sake of time)--so that I can really try to improve my speaking and listening capabilities. From here on out, I'm going to do my very best to stay on top of all my objectives.