What follows is my first project this semester - a letter from an American exchange student living with a host family in Japan to her classmate back home. Originally, I had planned to present this content in a more multidimensional fashion - recording the letter itself as audio narration, in conversational style, and pairing the audio with visual context. However, technical difficulties left me without the resources I would have needed to put that project together.
So, I revised. I decided to write my letter by hand, in order to force myself to improve my handwriting and to provide a way for myself to showcase kanji I already know and learn some new kanji that were relevant to the content. As one of my goals this year was to improve my Japanese reading and writing speed, I thought this would make a good test of my progress.
As is evident from looking at the letter, my handwriting is readable, but by no means polished or consistent. I found, to my surprise and satisfaction, that I was able to write hiragana-only sections with relative ease and speed - relative, that is, to the kanji-heavy sections. Frankly, writing such a long piece featuring so much (new) kanji was grueling - I had to take breaks between paragraphs. In retrospect, and in the interest of keeping my letter neat-looking, I probably should have picked a different name for 愛子, as 愛 was not only a new kanji for me, but a relatively complex one. I had lots of trouble trying to get the proportions close to correct, especially since I was keeping my writing fairly small (think 12-point font). It would have been much easier with more space to write.
As far as the letter composition goes, I was fairly happy with the process, and I think the finished product shows off my presentational writing skills quite well. I didn't have a hard time coming up with things to say or ways to say them, which seems like a good sign, and I was generally confident in my grammatical structure (although I did make several mistakes, which I now notice and know how to fix). To be quite honest, although my letter seems pretty long right now, I had a lot more to say - it could have easily been twice or three times this length. In the interest of keeping things manageable, however, I opted to cut myself off. It would be interesting, in the future, to see how long I can go...
This project was a nice tool to measure my progress, but I think it offers me plenty of room for improvement. I still have a long way to go in terms of improving my handwriting (I personally think it looks pretty juvenile, which may be appropriate as I've only been writing for a year), which I should take a more active approach to dealing with.