Exploring the Japanese Language Through Music (9/8)

こにちは！　はじめまして！

わたしは　Haroです。

わたしの だいがくは　Notre Dameです。

だいがくせいです。

にねんせいです。

せんこうは　 こうがくです。

あめりかじんです。

どうぞ　よろしく　おねがいします！

Recently, my hiragana practice has been going okay. I have a hard time sometimes recalling the m- and r- hiragana characters, and I am a bit slow when I try to remember how to pronounce characters with diacritical marks. Other than that, I am getting better at reading hiragana words! Lesson 1 has been going mostly great for me. I love being able to learn new vocabulary, but sometimes I get a bit confused because the words sound similar to each other. 

To explore the Japanese language a little further, I listened to two Japanese songs by a South Korean group called TWICE. I played each song twice and attempted to find familiar words by looking at the Romaji and ひらがな subtitles. 

The first song I listened to is called Breakthrough. I used to listen to this song frequently a few years back, so when I decided to play it, it reminded me of my high school years. It's an excellent upbeat and catchy song. As I read through the subtitles, I spotted familiar words and phrases. For example, the character は pronounced as "wa" appeared multiple times to indicate what the topic of a sentence is. Phrases from previous and current lectures such as わたし (watashi), なまえ (namae), いちど (ichido), and だれ (dare) were ones that I recognized in the song. Additionally, sentence structures with "の” to indicate possession appeared continuously.

The second song I listened to is called Doughnut. This song is slower paced and "softer" when compared to Breakthrough. This was a great song to listen to, but I had a challenging time understanding the lyrics. I rarely found words that I recognized. However, I was still able to find components of sentence structures such as は (wa) and の (no). I was able to find the phrase "suki", which is used to describe love.