I finished my ひぐらしのなくころに shadowing over winter break. I've noticed that my ability to shadow conversations has improved significantly as I got used to doing it. What makes shadowing initially frustrating is keeping tempo with the conversations, but as it becomes more natural to follow them, it becomes easier to imitate the conversations accordingly. I think that on top of making speaking Japanese in a conversation easier, shadowing really helps intonation. The only effective way to master intonation is to hear the intonation of a word and repeat it. While intonation exercises improve specific intonations very effectively, shadowing a conversation provides many opportunities to improve, that it has a wide impact on intonation if done often enough.
Looking on to the next semester, I think I will probably stop shadowing for a while to improve my reading ability and familiarity with kanji, which has become a bit of an obstacle in learning japanese. While I've become a bit better at speaking Japanese like a native speaker would, I feel my reading is still awkward (more along the lines of translating to English than truly reading). I look forward to studying kanji, examining passages from the text book, and perhaps even trying my hand at Japanese books (though I'll probably stick with kids books).
While I think I did improve over the course of the PE cycles, I think their effectiveness was stifled by my poor goal setting skills. I've always been better at assignments with strict deadlines than those that ask me to put in a little bit of time every day. I managed to control that problem by incentivizing my exercises, but nonetheless I still don't feel I do as good a job implementing my plans as I should.
