David and I started taking Japanese classes in November. We only study one hour two times a week with our teacher, but it was a good decision for us! We are seeing an improvement in our Japanese language skills. We sure have a long way to go, but we just were not able to pick up the language and study on our own when we could easily go for days without ever needing to use Japanese. Now we have a teacher who expects us to do our homework and we are able to ask her questions, so we can make sense of things we see and hear. It has been very useful.
It is also interesting because David and I are such opposite language learners! He is an oral/aural learner, and I learn through reading and writing. He can memorize things easily—even random things with no context. I can’t memorize easily and need a context—even a random one will help—before I can memorize things. I cannot even remember my name in katakana, while David can say MacDonald (as in the hamburger place) with ease! I have no desire to say MacDonald, so even if I learn it for one class period, it’s gone the next! However, ironically, I seem to remember many words longer than David. We have analyzed this as my not remembering anything through short-term memory, so I only remember it by moving it to long-term memory. My approach is to move things to long-term memory as soon as possible. David, on the other hand, has an excellent short-term memory, and he relies on it. If he uses things regularly, they slip into his long-term memory, but if he doesn’t use them, he forgets them very quickly. The result of our analysis is that we are much better at speaking Japanese together because then we can use the strengths of both of us. Mutual dependency!
Our classes are expensive, and we had thought about stopping them after a couple of months, but we have seen so much improvement (we certainly study more regularly) that we decided to continue indefinitely. Interestingly, our teacher this week suggested that if after one hour of lesson, it is not a convenient stopping place, we can go over our time. The one hour does go quickly, especially because we usually have a lot of questions.