Colton McOmber Reflection 4/28/2020

Reflection
In what ways have you improved as a learner of Japanese?
I have improved in many ways; I can now pick out words in a sentence and use
my knowledge of sentence patterns and vocab to make out/understand what is being
said. When I am reading it’s even better because I have knowledge of the kanji and it
helps link together the words into an understandable sentence. I believe that any fresh
out of high school kid could learn Japanese well and quickly by taking Japanese
language at Salt Lake Community College. Because I am a little older, I find it harder to
remember things and to make connections, but this semester really helped with
strengthening my brain.
What brought about those improvements? Point to specific experiences,
readings, assignments, or discussions in this course.
I Believe a major factor in that is the way I was taught. I would like to point to
learning vocab. In Ebira-sensei’s class he focused on making sure we knew the words
before anything else, so we studied the words before class, then we would use those
words throughout the week. He would also write on the board sentence patterns and
discuss/go over them with us. This was more helpful to me than just simply reading the
sentence patterns in the book because Ebira-sensei would apply those sentence
patterns to real life and talk about what is used in everyday language and what is not.

About homework/tests that had an impact for me, I believe it was the vocab tests.
The vocab tests would go over about half of the words we had to memorize, and they
would be chosen randomly out of that pool. I loved these because when I got a good
score on them, I know that I will retain most of the words learned in that section. I also
liked how Ebira-sensei would make use of past vocab throughout the semester, this
help renew and cement the vocab that we learned. Overall, I really enjoyed this class
and I really enjoyed the professor.