Friday, I’ve got only one class

Today is the eighteenth day of the spring semester 2024. I have one classes on Friday. Since the class is the first class in the morning, I can start my weekend at 10 a.m. The class was conversation for the first-year students. I made them answer a small quiz at the beginning. Students had to answer if a verb was transitive or intransitive, and to fill the blanks for particles. Of course, these two steps were related to each other. If you answered the verb is transitive, you end up use particle ”-o” for the blank in the sentence. I hoped my students figure out such relationships.

The target of today’s class was to know what I-adjectives are. Last time I taught Na-adjective. I checked in the class, whether or not my students know difference between I-adjectives and Na-adjectives. When you modify a noun with another noun, you put “no” between the two, when you modify a noun with an I-adjective, you put “i”, and when to modify a noun with a Na-adjective, you put “na”. It is so systematic, but probably it seems quite weird to my students that there are two types of adjectives in Japanese.

After the class, I slept on my bed one hour and started grading of the quizzes for two classes. I continued over lunch time, until 3p.m. Verb “au” is similar to “meet” and “see” in English and Verb “asobu” is a kind of “play” and “having a fun” in English. Since English verbs “meet” and ”play ” are transitive verb, I can understand many students answered that “au” and ”asobu” are transitive. The right answers are; “au (meet)” and “asobu (play)” are Intransitive in Japanese. But what I cannot understand was that some students answered that “iku(go)” and “Okiru(get up)” are transitive verbs. Does one say “I go me to the school”, “I get my consciousness up in the morning”? It is likely that many students haven’t got an idea about what the action is like yet.

Finishing grading, I went shopping to campus supermarket. It was rainy outside, it’s rare because there has been blue sky these days. Back in my room I started making PPT for Monday class. A PPT for one class was completed by 9 p.m., and then I went to bed soon.