Lesson 3: Mason pays his bill. Until today, Makoto had basically been giving lessons on credit. We couldn't seem to find an online payment method we both used. At first, he thought he had PayPal. It later turned out he had Popmoney. Then I thought I'd give him cash, but my ATM card's magnetic strip is apparently dead. Finally, we landed on Square. He had previously used the reader (and thus had an account), and I had signed up for Square Cash earlier today for a completely unrelated reason.
Anyhoo. The lesson. As I described it to my wife Ruby, I basically spend the hour barely keeping up. I remember bits and pieces from my first go at the language, but my memories are muddled with even earlier ones from my time studying Spanish. On more than one occassion in the past two weeks I've accidentally let slip something more Latin than East Asian.
I spent time between this lesson and the last reviewing hiragana, one of Japanese's two phonetic alphabets. This helped tremendously when Makoto unexpectedly pulled out the textbook and asked me to read some dialog. Awww yeah. Apart from my snail's pace and distinctly gaijin intonation and pronunciation, I don't think I did half bad!
Suddenly: "Okay, now write this kanji."
What?! We hadn't actually covered any writing until this point - strictly reading. I dug back in my memory and tried to remember lessons on stroke order and direction.
And, somehow, I got it right. At least, the first one. The rest were a total shit-show.
But it's okay. That's why I'm doing this.