Goal Statement For Class!

Alright so in regards to my weaknesses and goals...

It's not too hard for me to memorize vocabulary, grammar and other technical points like that, in fact I feel like that's the part of learning a new language where I have the most fun! For me the main thing I need to work on is the pitch and intonation part of my prosody. My speed of speaking is adequate at this point but the feedback I received from Shibata Sensei let me know that I tend to raise my pitch at the end of sentences and that this isn't good in Japanese unless i'm asking a question. (Which I wasn't doing so, oops!) I guess the problem is I'm perhaps still imitating a more English way of speaking where slight raises in pitch (regardless of words) indicates a bit of deference and cordiality.

Hopefully I'll be able to work on this and improve a bit by shadowing  and paying extremely close attention to that particular aspect of speaking when listening to music or anime for the next couple of weeks. I watch anime and listen to music a lot most weeks so I won't set an exact time that I'll be doing this but I'll say that for at lest five minutes of every anime episode or for the first chorus of each song I'll try to listen to/ imitate pitch patterns very closely.