“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” – Mother Teresa
This practice is of course all about days of the week. Your focus should be on learning what day is what and working on recalling them more quickly each time. Don’t worry if you have to sing the song or use the mnemonic each time to remember what’s what. That’s the stepping stone to get you to a fast recall. Each time just be sure to push yourself a little harder to get it.
Exercise 1
Grab yourself seven pieces of paper. Note cards are good, but anything will work. On each, write down one day of the week in English (Monday… Tuesday… Wednesday…). Take your cards and mix them up and flip them over one by one. When you flip over the card, say the day of the week in Japanese.
If at first you only get one or two, that’s okay. Go through the deck a couple of times then take a break. Fifteen minutes will do, just make sure you’re doing something completely different from Japanese. Then, come back and grab one card you don’t know. Learn that one card (only one!) and then mix it up in your weeks deck. Now, try again, making sure you can recall that one card. When you’ve done this a couple times, get up and do something else to restart this process until you know all seven quite well. These are important words, so it’s best you learn them now. No cheating!
Exercise 2
Now that you know your days of the week, it’s time to put them to some use. Read the following sentences, understand how they work, and try to come up with your own similar variations as you go along.
a やっと金曜日だよ！
It’s finally Friday!
a 昨日は木曜日でした。
Yesterday was Thursday
a 今日は水曜日だ。
Today is Wednesday.
a 土曜日は肉を食べます。
On Saturdays I eat meat.
a 毎週月曜日に集まります
(We) get together every Monday.
a 母は毎週日曜日にビンゴをしに行きます。
Mom goes to play bingo every Sunday
a 来週の火曜日は私のお誕生日だ！
Next week Tuesday is my birthday!
Make sure you can understand all of these. Also, make sure you can make variations on them as well. This will help you to get into the habit of thinking for yourself rather than thinking of sentences you’ve read / learned. Oh, and it will help for exercise 3, too.
Exercise 3
Using the days of the week, write about what you do on each day of the week on Lang-8. For example, if you go to underwater basket-weaving lessons on Monday, you should write about that. You could even title it something hilarious like マイ週 (GET IT? EVERY WEEK AND “MY WEEK” ALL IN ONE? YOU’RE SO CLEVER KOICHI. WHY THANK YOU [wlm_firstname]!).
The point of this exercise is to use the days of the week as well as make you think about different things that you do and write about them. Since they’re hopefully going to be somewhat different things, it will force you to write in different ways each time, really adding to the practice.
Be sure to look back on your previous “time-based” entries for things you can work on and fix for this one. Improve a little each time, okay?