Our third lesson, and katakana were on the menu again. We practiced by trying to work out which pictures of foods went with which strings of kana. The names of most of the foods were relatively anglicised, and so it was quite straightforward to connect the images to the words once the first couple of syllables were in place: “su – pe – ge… was probably going to be spaghetti, for example.

I felt a bit disappointed in myself when I heard how well some of my classmates knew the kana. I’d only learned a handful of lines. “They’ve probably done some before,” said Laura, “don’t beat yourself up about it.”

To finish, we learned about numbers from 1 to 99. Next week, BINGO!