Lesson 6/18/2016

For some reason, it felt like last night's lesson with 先生 jumped a decent amount in difficulty. I had to do a LOT of listening to be able to answer her questions, and a lot of quick thinking to respond to unexpected cues. Even though I had plenty of mistakes, I'm feeling better about my listening and speaking skills very gradually. I'm going to list some mistakes from sentences I previously wrote (along with their corrections), then I'll list some new vocab she taught me.

父は面白かったひとです。
My father was an interesting person.
I have to conjugate the adjective to the past with かった, rather than saying でした.

大学で情報科学を勉強しました。
At college, I studied computer science.
大学で is flexible in its placement, so I chose to put it at the beginning of the sentence. I have to use を instead of が because it's the direct object of my "studied" verb.

私はいろんな人に会いたいです。
I want to meet lots of people.
Without the いろんな, my other sentence sounded like I was saying I wanted to meet a single person, which is awkward. Adding that makes it sound like I want to meet a variety of people.

New Vocab:

いっぱんてき or 一般的 = general

じかん = time
Example: 八じかん = 8 hours

あさがた = morning person

よるがた = night owl

おい or 甥 = nephew

めい or 姪 =  niece

めいわく = nuisance

めんどくさい = troublesome

たび or 旅 = travel

じょうず or 上手 = good at

うまい = good

きいた　こと　が　ありません = I haven't heard of it.

みた　こと　が　ありません =  I haven't seen it.

おしょうがつ = New Year

めずらしい = rare, not common (can be used to reference an unusual name)

いいません or ひみつ = I'd prefer not to say. (it's a secret)

ところ = place

しぜん = nature

たいへん = Not very translatable, but a way of showing sympathy.

There's more vocab in our chat, but I think I'll have to ask her to clarify a couple meanings for it. From our conversation, it's obvious that I need to practice speaking about travel, which is something I haven't done much of. I was holding back on it because it's apt to be more verb-heavy, but I'll see what I can do. Other than that, I'll have to get her feedback on what else I should practice more.