Season ONE: Dazai Osamu, Daffodil

Day 28

May 18, 2025

Sitting down to take a quiz and realizing quite quickly you know pretty much nothing, is always a pleasurable experience. Thankfully, I have a few things going for me: no required grade to prove my worth, the creator of the test sitting right next to me, and that creator telling me this quiz was designed for advanced learners, and not me.

So, in contrast to last night where I was able to focus on the structure of ～ていたら～た, and suss out meaning with a bit of traipsing through the dictionary, tonight was a jumble within a jumble. And more than a bit demoralizing. Especially coming out of one of our Live sessions where everyone around me is speaking like a champ, and I’m trying to understand a near simple sentence about some cat chatting the proverbial “me” up at the bus stop.

After 5 to 7 minutes of trying to figure out first question without going to the dictionary for help, I was able to guess a bit and narrow down my choices to two “possibles.” I chose the wrong one. A bit more time on the second question ended the same way. For the next three, the big fat “NEXT” button brought me more quickly to my deserved big fat goose egg. I asked Reiko, who was just winding down from the Live session we’d just done if she had some advice…

First, we ended up going over the structure of the sentences in the first quiz problem to be sure I was aware of what was going within my sentence problem, and the options from which I had to choose for my answer. From there, she broke down the vocabulary that was holding me captive, paying particular attention to Japanese verb conjugations where auxiliaries were also being appended. Then, she settled on my focusing on a single sentence… one with useful vocabulary I could put into my study deck and learn for the long haul. You can see the sentence in my notes. Of course, I knew bus, and bus stop. Everything else was new to me. The ～ていたら～た grammar aspect from yesterday, I understood entirely, and  the verb conjugation I could at least intuit to a fair enough degree.

Not the best of lessons for me, and if I didn’t have someone (or, two) working with me to help me feel less like a schmuck, I’d probably feel worse. Precisely the reason why working with someone is so important. Find that person.

Good luck, all! And, keep at it.

D

Time spent: @ 30 minutes
Completed Anki deck: Yep.
Start time: 11:03pm
End time: 11:34pm
Disturbance-meter: Low. Kid was great.
Busy-meter: Typical. Busy, but not unmanageable.