The second time around, I found the task at once more difficult and more rewarding. Having to write a longer piece in Japanese, especially due to the fact that this was a much less rigid, structured prompt than last time, took a surprisingly longer amount of time due to the fact that I had much more freedom with regards of which grammatical structures to use. After looking at the corrections, I see that this freedom, in turn, led to a lot of mistakes, most of which were idiomatic in nature. There are countless ways to express a single thought in English (as well as Japanese), and I was unable to really get a sense of what a natural manner of expressing even simple concepts might ressemble in Japanese. Simple translation or even adherence to the text-book does not necessarily accomplish this. For this reason, I found the Lang-8 activity, especially this time, to be very helpful. It gave me the chance to sort of step back and benefit from the eye of someone who has a different (and obviously more strongly rooted) relationship to the language. Even just changing particles, 例えば、で toでは,も to にも, and に to へ, without an explanation, helped me really reflect on what these small differences change about the overall feeling and content of the text. I definitely gained a lot from this exercise.
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