One week of class down

I guess I should've have written this sooner, but my second week of class starts tomorrow. LET'S REVIEW:

Kanji 2

I think I'm going to like this class. When I went last week there were 5 people (including me) all doing our best to remember the kanji we were supposed to have learned in the last class (which I did not take, but one would freaking hope that after a B.A. I would know SOMEthing, for the sake of our higher education system, if not for me). As it is, there were some that I did not know, and although I thought I had reviewed up to the point where we would be in 2, I missed about...6 chapters. Ugh. So I'm going through them. Luckily it is a lot of stuff I recognize, even if I can't necessarily pull it out of thin air with a pencil. Good review is good after all.

Intermediate 4

I have some problems with this class and they don't stem from what the 3 of us (including me) did as far as material (easy grammar, though it maybe—I really need the vocab work), but as far as learning to pronounce things. Not to say I'm not happy I signed up, but I'm just really worried about picking up horrible pronunciation habits. They teach this super basic elementary-reading-speak that just irks me. It feels like the equivalent of spoken romaji, honestly. Let's see if I can demonstrate in writing.

We worked on あげる、くれる、もらう and the honorific/humble equivalents. A sentence like:

お母さんは妹に本をあげました。

turns into:

お母さんは？ 妹に？ 本を？ あげました。

NOTE THE QUESTION MARKS AND SPACES.

Not that it really sounded like a question per se, but it was the easiest way to indicate the annoying upswing in pitch on the end of every particle with a little pause as if the grammar had to digest. I understand this might be the way you teach 5 year olds how to read, but we're not 5 and we want to sound like really human beings. Japanese 5 year olds speak it alllll the time so they even out. We mostly speak English and come to school to speak Japanese, so give us the real deal and don't baby us.

/end vent

I dunno. Maybe it's selfish and I don't mean to sound like an arrogant jerk, but one thing people have always noted about my Japanese is that I have decent pronunciation, so I really don't want to mess it up by getting this drill-speak in my head. In fact, I'm a little terrified of it. Hopefully if I supplement with lots of native exposure I'll be ok.

*worryworry*