The following was sent to me by Morgan, who kindly gave me permission to repost her question and my reply here, just in case it helps anyone else who is struggling with ideas for their G-Time projects:
I'm pretty confused about my G-Time project. I have been thinking about it for a few days and I still havent been able to come up with anything that I really like. I was thinking about the fluency test, but I don't understand what I would hand in at the end of the semester, or what that includes.
What I would really want to do is something with art and culture but I am having a hard time grasping what kind of projects I could do. I was thinking about illustrating the "remembering the kana" book, or even something about the cultural attributes of Japan and how the Japanese lifestyle is different from the American one. I like these ideas, but I have no clue what I would do for these topics. Do you have any more examples of projects you can do? Thank you for your help!
If you want to prepare for the JLPT, then you would probably end up handing in the materials that you used to study--notes, flashcards (preferably in Anki format! =), quizzes that you created for yourself, notes as to your strategy to study, a list of books/web sites/people that you used to prepare, etc. I don't really care about the format of what you hand in, it just needs to be some way to show what you've been doing.
If you want to do something with the kana book, how about being really ambitious and writing your own? Lots of Heisig's stories need some work, and if you have the eye of an artist maybe you could just start from scratch and develop your own similar system! That would be an amazingly wonderful project, and one that many other future Japanese students from around the world would benefit from.
If you want to do something about daily life in Japan, you might want to set the goal of, for example, finding a few Japanese people in various parts of Japan and just writing to them to ask them about how their life is different. If you want to do this, I can hook you up with some Japanese college students. In fact, I know of some Japanese college students who might like to do a kind of photo-documentary swap with you, exchanging photos of their daily life for you to compare yours with...
(Anyone else still fishing for ideas?)
I actually have a couple of Zelda mangas in Japanese (with furigana even ^.^). Though looking back over them, there's a lot of text...maybe I should do a few chapters instead or something. But thank you so much for the suggestion! That sounds like a lot more fun then just flat-out studying.
(I really wish I could figure out how to get rid of the by-post subject lines... （ーー； )
Sure! Go ahead and propose it, either individually or as a group, and let me see if I can wrangle someone up via my connection at Mie University. If not, you may have to find your own person in Japan, though!
I would really love to do the photo-documentary swap thing! Can I do that? If Morgan wants to do it too maybe we could find a way to make it a group project?
Oops, forgot to respond to the wiki part of the question.
Go ahead and select it and see! It will just give you a form that you can use to create a new wiki-like page. Wiki-like pages are editable by other people besides the creator (I think). They also support formatting using something called "Markdown", which allows you to create links to other pages using double brackets. For example, if there is a wiki page that has the title "Nouns", then you can create a link to it from other wiki pages by typing [[Nouns]]. (In fact, I think that you can do that from most pages on the site.)
I think that translating a manga or something like that would be an excellent project. I love anything that involves working with real language. BUT, I think that doing it this first semester of Japanese would be very challenging. We won't get some essential grammar until the end of this/beginning of next semester, so you would be having to really strain with every word and every bit of grammar, and working far ahead of the class. My recommendation is that you hold off on this one until next semester (and be sure to take one of my JPNS 1002 classes!), and give it a shot then. It would still be very challenging, but much more doable than now.
If you want to do something this semester that would tie into doing a manga translation next semester, then you might want to do something that would involve beyond-the-book intensive study. As one possible example, take a manga that you think you would like to translate next semester, use it just to create a list of kanji & vocab words that you will need to know, and create Anki decks to help learn those words.
If you don't have a specific manga in mind, then let me know what kind of thing you're interested in, and I might be able to make some suggestions.
One thing I thought about doing in the beginning was doing some kind of translation of a manga or some other book - preferably something simple. It would tie in with why I'm studying, since I want to become a translator. But I'm not sure how much grammar/vocab I would need to do something like this, since I know very little and we're probably only going to learn the basics anyway for this particular class, ne?
I really don't want to write a paper if I can avoid it, because that's boring...o_o; So I'm probably going to go with kanji study...I would like to know, though: under "Create content", it says you can make a wiki. How do you go about doing that?
Just a word of caution, while I haven't read the Zelda mangas, fantasy/sci-fi genre manga are often pretty rough, because they tend to use archaic and otherwise odd language. For your first attempt at manga, I would suggest that you try something with a lot of conversation in a modern day setting.