The attached file is the second writing sample I completed for my first semester of Japanese. In it, I introduce my family members and give some basic information about them.
I decided to upload this writing sample over my first one because it's a better reflection of what I can do with the language, or, what I could do at the time. My first writing sample, as evidenced by the audio version on another entry, was very basic and very short, and I felt like I could really do better than that for my portfolio. This sample is about twice as long and uses a wider range of expressions.
Since I didn't at the time know very much Japanese, I tried to use everything I did know and expand the ways I was using it - for example, talking about more than one person at a time, pointing out similarities between people, and talking about my brother, who is a student in high school instead of college. I feel that performing such expansion, even if I make mistakes, helps with my understanding of the language, because by making mistakes and getting feedback on how to fix them, I can learn a set of basic rules about how and how not to use it.
I'm always looking for ways to practice writing in Japanese as well, so I used my writing sample as practice for hiragana recognition. I typed the sample in hiragana first, then transliterated it into romaji. I try to do that often, and perhaps as a result, I feel like I've become fairly competent at using and recognizing hiragana within a relatively short time span.
Looking at my writing sample now, it seems very stiff and basic, and although I still don't know enough Japanese to describe people very naturally, I feel like I've gotten closer to that. Since learning adjectives and adjective modifiers, I could probably describe these family members in more detail and more accurately now than I could have at the time of this writing.