Day 10 Thoughts

Day 10: Wednesday 10 June

project update on tdes
On today's show I gave a bit of an update on how the project's going.
This is from the transcript:

Today is day number ten and it’s been going really well so far thanks to all the comments that people have left.

One thing that I’ve noticed so far is that my confidence in speaking Japanese has improved. I was pretty nervous on day 1 but I’m getting more and more relaxed on camera. And off camera too – which is good because obviously that’s the point.

I think it’s partly because I’m doing it in public. So now when I talk to someone in Japanese I kind of think, well if they wanted to the whole world could go and watch those videos and see me making mistakes, and laughing nervously, and just generally not sounding very good … so why should I even care if I make a mistake in front of this one person.

So that’s one thing I’ve noticed. And another thing I’ve learnt is how great the annotation system is on YouTube. I’ve never really used it before – but it’s perfect for this exercise. So what I do is, I read people’s comments and then I add the corrections into the video with annotations and I think that’s the thing that really helps me learn from the mistakes. If I just read the comments and didn’t do anything with them, I don’t think I would really learn anything from them.

knf's help
I don't think this project would work without knf. (KNF is my partner - and co-worker - and is a native Japanese speaker). As I'm going though the comments I check with him as to whether what people are saying is correct or not.
If I didn't have a native speaker to check with someone could be giving me bad advice and I wouldn't know.

My Confidence
This is a comment from vlog#5:
レベルすごく高いので自身もってください。リラックスしてね。
A nice, encouraging comment and I think my confidence is slowly improving :)
One of the thing that kept knocking my confidence over the years of studying was the situations when I would speak be speaking Japanese with someone ... and then, the first time I made a slight mistake or I didn't quite understand what they said, they would look really happy and immediately switch to English. These people were, of course, thinly-veiled "English Vampires" (i.e. selfish, thoughtless people). Thankfully, there are many people who are not like this and are amazingly encouraging, kind, thoughtful etc. Thanks to those amazing people, my Japanese improved slowly. But, having a white face seemed to make me a beacon for English Vampires and I met enough over the years for it to impact my confidence.
Still, it's always up to you how you react to things, so I take full responsibility for my level of confidence. At the end of the day it's up to me to take steps to do what I can to increase my confidence. I just know for sure that for many people (like me) it's not as easy as someone saying: Don't worry about making mistakes! That is true, you shouldn't worry. But ... not worrying doesn't come naturally to everyone. So, it's something most of us need to work on.

vocab/expressions

上位　じょうい　(vlog #4)
a higher rank
大人な表現
Comment:
ランキングの　上のほう　です⇒　
ランキングの　上位　です・・　より大人な表現

確定的 かくていてき (vlog #5)
確定　decision
状態 じょうたい
を表現 ひょうげん

彼　は　ファン、いっぱいいるみたいです (確定的状態を表現）
彼　には　ファン、いっぱいいるみたいです （推定的状態）
なら大丈夫ですよ。　

推定的 すいていてき
状態 じょうたい
推定　estimate