Lesson 37 & Marimite episode 6

[elfs]

So, I watched the first half of Episode 6 of Maria-Sama ga Miteru (known among its fans as just Marimite, "Mary Watches"), just after finishing Lesson 37 in my Japanese classes (only one month to go now and I'll be halfway through the course!), and it's really frustrating to listen to the show. I find myself pausing it incessantly. "What did she say? What word was that?" Over and over, with my laptop dictionary opened and trying to figure out what she was saying. And I know most of the common adverbs now, and how to count and tell the days of the week, and I'm familiar with about a third of all the verb forms, most of them very common such as present tense, imperative, necessary (yes, there's a "necessary tense" in Japanese, and the verb ending is a heck of a tongue twister... you try saying "-na kareba naranain desu" quickly!), past, and potential ("can do..."). I don't know the different verb constructions yet because the class is strictly conversational; the theory of Japanese structure isn't taught. I keep meaning to get to that, but it requires more than just quiet time, it takes a desk and paper.

I feel like I'm so close. It's all a matter of vocabulary now, in much the same way that I know Java, it's all a matter of knowing what the libraries offer. And I think I'm getting me head around the kanji, which is equally hard, because it's a matter of memorizing visual representations of a concept in much the way that conversation is the conversion of concepts into verbal representations, and I've demonstrated that I can do that. Now it's just practice.