October 20, 2022

I finally added something from the “taking care of others” category for my daily habit. This week, I’m helping the girls do their homework every night. I’ve been avoiding this category for a couple of reasons. One, this project is one of my own making, so it doesn’t seem quite right to force it upon others. Two, especially with my daughters, I typically opt for choosing my battles with them, and don’t want to rely on their compliance for my success.

In this case, I made an exception though, mostly because we have been concerned about the girls not doing their homework and falling behind in their Japanese immersion classes. My youngest daughter’s teacher even gave us a deadline for her to learn all of the hiragana characters (that’s the primary 46-character phonetic alphabet) by the end of October, as she should have learned them already by the end of first grade last year.

So far, it’s actually been pretty fun. The girls generally read a short passage in Japanese a few times, then I go through hiragana flash cards with my younger daughter, and help my older daughter answer questions about the reading. The flash cards are the best part, because I try to make up mnemonics to help her remember the characters, and there is a lot of laughing as she makes fun of me doing my charades. It’s working though! There are still a few characters that she gets stuck on, but for the most part, I think she can recognize all of them visually at this point. Next, I want to work on telling her the sound and having her write the character, a bigger challenge. 

In college, which was, alas, many many years ago, I studied Japanese, and spent a year living in a homestay in Kyoto during my junior year abroad. At that time, I was relatively fluent, and knew about 2,000 kanji, which are the Chinese characters – the third system of writing in Japan. Sadly, I have lost a lot of that knowledge over the years, including almost all of the kanji. Still, I know enough that I can help my 2nd and 4th grade children with their homework. We’ll see how long it takes before they’ve outpaced my ancient brain!

(Oh, and no, this habit was not on my original list of habits! I added it when I saw the need.)