Chasing The Day: How To Form A Sentence

I have finally done it! I have finally learned how to form a complete, grammatically correct sentence in Japanese (I know if have talked little bit about this already in my last post but I am just so excited!). Up until just a few days ago, my vocabulary has of course been building but I had no idea how to put it all together to form a logic sentence and now way of explaining to my family or teachers at school that that was what I was struggling with. That is, until I met Mark! Mark is a teacher at my school from Ireland who is doing a home stay while he teaches at Kanan. He has offered to help teach me Japanese during the periods when I am in the library (if he doesn't have a class). It has been wonderful to have his help. Not only has he gotten me to understand the grammar of a simple sentence in less than an hour, he has also been teaching me a bit about the Japanese culture and the Japanese culture behind some of the words and phrases I can say.

Mark is also great in the fact that he is like me and does not like textbooks... where as any book in a Japanese persons mind is amazing and makes everything better (Nihonjin dakarane, shaanaine~ it's the Japanese way, it can't be helped). In the past two weeks it seems like any time I see my home room teacher, Mr. Kita, he has another new textbook for me to use to help me study Japanese. I liked the way Mark phrases his opinion on all of my textbooks- textbooks are fine and dandy if you have a long time to study them... but I am only here for a year and need to learn quickly. Textbooks are also a bit stuffy and always in the proper form, not very conversational. So, it has been a great few days! Mark has taught me the layout of a sentence, particles, verbs, nouns, adjectives, and some words people use in conversations to make it more personable.

It feels great to be able sit with my host dad (who knows minimal English) and have small conversations at dinner. For the most part I have been able to understand the broad topics of conversations but could not respond in Japanese- he was so proud of me when I was able to respond in a complete sentence the other night!

I feel like I am progressing fairly quickly now and able to take in even more vocabulary now that I understand the structure of what is being said. So, it was funny to me when Mr. Kita came into the library the other day (after I had gained all of this new information from Mark) and said that he wanted to spend thirty minutes with me studying greetings... I think you can understand my relief when Mark walked in just after the first few minutes of greetings practice with Mr. Kita to take over my lesson- I learned greetings before I came to Japan over a month ago, talk about a giant step back in my learning.

Just a quick note of other things I have been up to this week:
1. Today I taught and played frisbee with Otousan
2. I practiced wadaiko (Japanese Drums) for the very first time- it is super difficult!
3. Prepared for my schools sports festival (on Tuesday):
- I am competing in a frisbee throwing relay and I amazed the sannensai (3 graders~ seniors) when I was able to throw the frisbee the entire 30(ish) meters in just one throw, during a practice run of the event. It takes everybody else at least two throws.
- I am also competing in a 200m run. The girl in the lane next to me is also in my gym class and saw me run earlier this week. When she saw that I was in the same heat as her, she nervously asked me what my time was for a 200m run. I had to tell her I was sorry because I don't know how fast I can run a 200m (it's been a long time since I have tried) and she responded with something like "oh... well your really fast, so...". I felt bad but it was also pretty funny because I am already psyching out my competition and I haven't even gotten a chance to run my fastest yet (I was only jogging in gym).
4. Otousan and I went to watch the kindergarten sports festival today (Okaasan was working at it). The little kids are still adorable as ever!