I love language. Just, in general. Every language teaches you so much about not only an entire culture, but also about different ways of thinking and particular values and connections to entire peoples in a way you wouldn’t be able to perform or perhaps even know of without experiencing another’s native language (or at least attempting to). This fascinates me, and that’s not even getting into the intricacies of cultural preservation or lingual development, etc. That is a lot of big talk for my only knowing English and French, but, well, I’m working on it (clearly). As for Japanese in particular? First off, I myself am part Japanese (only ⅛, but my great-grandmother is still around, so). Unfortunately, a large amount of my Japanese-American family resides in Hawaii so I don’t see them terribly often, but there’s always been little drops of Japanese culture in my life, from knowing how to use chopsticks since before I can remember to practically being raised on Studio Ghibli films (though those have long since worked their way into American culture, they will never leave any of our hearts) to my mother reading me Japanese children’s stories when I was younger from a book that’s weathered a few generations by now (in English, it should be noted). This all lead up to a foreign exchange program and home-stay I participated in the summer between junior and senior year of high school, where I actually had to pick up the language much much more (as I’m sure you can imagine, staying in a small town in the middle of Hokkaido requires at least a base knowledge of the language to get anything done at all). I’ve lost a lot of it since then, but I figured the first year of college was as good a time as any to try to pick it up again and actually receive a more formal education this time.
At this point we are now four weeks into this First-Year Japanese class, also known as the most time-demanding class in my schedule by far. Though I suppose that should really be expected of any foreign language class, let alone one that uses three alphabets completely unlike our own Latin one. It certainly is and will continue to be a challenging class, but I look forward to it!
