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Learning in a community is probably how I’ve learned the best. Even though when I took Spanish in High-school a lot of the activities were speaking activities in groups. I feel this is one of the best ways to teach. Though it may be scary for some students, and it definitely was scary for me and still is. It can boost engagement with each-other, students can help one another, if talking to a professor may be too scary. It can also have students engage with the language more by asking questions on something maybe culturally related to the language. I know when I was learning Spanish, the movie, Coco came out. It was a big talking point in my Spanish class and we even watched it during one of our classes.
A community could be a class, a single person and yourself, or even as big of a group as the KCAI Language Community is. I’ve already noticed how much passion and love everyone in the group has for Japan and the language of Japanese. I also think having different generational views in the group are also helpful to maybe see an area of Japanese/Japan that you’ve never seen before.
To me, community is motivation, it’s motivation to reach points that I wouldn’t have been able to reach by myself. This is very true while I was attempting to learn Hiragana on my own. I didn’t have the motivation like I do in class.
Great observations! I agree that generational views are important. SInce I started speaking Japanese more than 3 decades ago, the language has changed a lot. it is important to have these new imputs, but it is equally valuable to learners with longer experiences to see how the language is evolving.... sometimes in surprising ways.
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