Japanese IV A

Grade: A

For Japanese IV for my senior year, I continued Rosetta Stone and used Verbling to supplement my learning, which is a online language tutor website. Just the same as my prior years of Japanese, I enjoyed Rosetta Stone because the immersive style of learning it provides helped enhance my knowledge of the language. In addition, the language tutoring service Verbling was an awesome supplement to this course.

Verbling was a necessity for me because whenever I’d have questions about something I was learning in Rosetta Stone, my Verbling tutor was able to answer them for me. The tutor I had was fluent in English so I didn’t need a lot of experience in Japanese. I learned more complex words, new sentences and more advanced conversation skills.

This final semester of my high school Japanese experience got me very excited to move on to college level. Next semester, while still a high school student, I will be dual enrolled in my community college’s offering of Japanese 111. I decided to start with the beginner class because I want to fill any holes in my learning. With Rosetta Stone I learned a lot. However, I was not feeling confident that the things I learned were the same things that college students were learning. In Rosetta Stone, I learned how to say things such as “the people are eating” and “the girl is swimming,” but I didn’t become very proficient in conversation skills which are so essential. Since I’m considering working in the tourism industry in Hawai’i, I want to be able to have strong conversation skills. So I decided I’d rather take the extra time to start at the level of Japanese 111 than take a more advanced college class and not have a strong foundation in Japanese.

Therefore, I really look forward to starting Japanese 111 at community college. Rosetta Stone and Verbling worked out great over these past years, and I cannot wait to further delve into my Japanese language studies.