Last Week of Senior Exhibit-- written document.

All right. Finally done with my senior year, and as far as I am aware, my Senior Exhibit. I would say as far as I am concerned, but I am still willing and eager to help anyone and everyone learn Japanese who would like my help. That might not be happening at the moment, though.

Last week was pretty much the final week of the Senior Exhibit process... sad. But a lot happened. First, on the Tuesday of that week (busy as ever with the process and school) every senior set up for part of a Senior Exhibit Fair held for Fredericksburg Academy juniors and parents of juniors and seniors, as well as anyone else interested. I actually met two other people who were able to had lived in Japan and one parent was able to speak some Japanese which took me a while to answer. I believe she was rusty after several years, and I was rusty after a couple months of not using Japanese other than infrequently in the class. It took me a few moments to collect my thoughts and answer. I mostly answered questions and tried to get around to some friends' exhibit presentations. But I was more or less occupied at my table.

Towards the end of the week camewhat I thought was a rather difficult part of my exhibit, the Written Document. I had decided to create a guidebook giving some short information about basic Japanese. Honestly, I planned to make it more in depth than I did, but there was a good reason I had to stop. I thought that over 20 pages was a pretty decent length, more than a lot of people would want to read. And the thing is I really included a lot of basic grammar information that would be very useful and vocabulary that is useful as well.

I would like to talk about what it was like making the document. For the most part, it was very tedious!!!! I cannot stress how much more effort it takes to communicate complicated knowledge than to understand it-- at least from my end. How come when it's considered to be a vice to be selfish and talk only about oneself (and the easier thing to do) it's so much harder to communicate with teaching about one's own topic? I found it a lot easier to take the complicated information in. Enough complaining though. Anyone who reads it might even who knows Japanese (I don't think I made any mistakes but a Japanese person would know!) might at least find it impressive that I sat down and typed it in Japanese and English Romaji characters. It's no big deal if you do it all the time, but personally it was extremely tedious. To keep switching back and forth. (If you want to know what it is like, it's very easy to google how to enter east asian languages such as Japanese with your keyboard... and it might as well be an exhibit in itself.)

Really the most difficult part was having to explain everything carefully, accurately, and using the correct terminology. I couldn't make mistakes if this was the final part of my exhibit and I definitely couldn't afford to explain things poorly, or the document would just be useless.

Ulimately, it's designed to give people a small understaning of Japanese, and won't be helpful beyond the very basics (of course the "basics" in Japanese-- such as the order of sentences as well as the writing system are complex). Its main purpose was to give people an edge in learning and teach people how to study it themselves. By people... I mean whoever wants to read it. Maybe nobody, but I'll keep it with me and who knows, I might use it in the future or use it to explain something to someone else. I'll keep it with me for a little while. And I'm trying to figure out the best way to upload the file or the text; that should be here in juuuuuuust a moment.



And now that my senior exhibit (and my high school year) is over, I am tempted to just leave the post here and go about my day and whatnot, but I should really talk about the final impact of my senior exhibit.

Let me explain something. Many other seniors' exhibits may have been focused around service and helping others. I did choose to teach and my heart was in it, but at the same time this was not my original goal. My original goal was self-improvement; my plans to help others (that I have) are really part of a much more elaborate project not directly related to this, but I felt like I needed to learn Japanese to prove something to myself. No, I don't know Japanese. I'm not fluent, and I expect I won't be in the next year and a half (yes, maybe after that. I am planning on moving fast.) But I learned more than I really thought possible in January of 2008 when I started this. I did so much by working on my own and truly that has been the greatest reward. I feel like I have explained everything about the impact of what I have done already. My blogs have really told you the greater impact of what I have done. I have gotten a few students interested in Japanese, but mostly this has been about self-growth. This was important to me, and I tried to have what I called success. I succeeded in all the areas that were most important to me, and I did everything I could to keep my club up as well. I know that I can't be a perfect teacher or (先生) today as I am still very much and I mean very much a student (学生) (the second kanji in each of the two Japanese words in parentheses are the same because the words have similar meaning... just saying). Anyway just writing system of the Japanese language as you can kind of see is enormous! (over 5,000 kanji that are considered "vital" to the individual Japanese person. Sooooo excited to learn them...)

So hey! At least I am planning on going forth with studying Japanese. And I am not sure I would have done this if I did not study it now. I plan on making the Japanese language and perhaps foreign language and general an integrated part of my life. And for anyone who reads this and has any questions, feel free to ask. If my newest post isn't more than several months old by that time (it's probably going to happen) I'll definitely try to get back to you. And even so. I guess that's everything I have to say now about my Senior Exhibit. It's been a good experience. Time to get that guide up!