I have been fascinated with Japanese culture for pretty much as long as I can remember. From an early childhood filled with Pokemon and YanYan to my trip to Japan when I was 15, I have constantly attempted to immerse myself in Japanese culture. Back at home in San Francisco, many of our friends are Japanese speakers, and hearing them use the language is a constant reminder of how beautiful and interesting it is. After spending four years learning French, a romance language, I decided to switch it up and go for something completely different by choosing to study Japanese.
I find it so exciting that I will soon be reading entirely new alphabets! Hopefully, someday soon, I will get to go back to Japan and use my knowledge of the language to actually get around – last time I was there, I had no clue what I was doing and relied heavily on my group's tour guide.
After the first four weeks, I think the thing that I am struggling with most is the order of words in Japanese. It is so drastically different than English or French that I just don't even know where to start when composing sentences. I think that I have to commit myself to making the sentence patterns seem like second nature and then it will become much more clear to me.
Canada san, it's great that you have a lot of connections to Japanese culture and people who speak Japanese. I am sure it will accelerate your language learning pretty soon---and I really hope you visit Japan again. Have a wonderful semester! TA むらい
ReplyDeleteThank you! Hopefully our japanese-speaking friends will be a great resource when I go home for the summer.
DeleteI studied French too - it's so different learning Japanese!
ReplyDeleteChoate-san, learning an Asian language can be really tough especially when you have no background in it. However, it seems like you are really committed to learning the language and that will definitely guide you to success! Keep practicing and I can't wait to converse in Japanese with you.
ReplyDeleteI think it's so cool that you took French and now you're taking Japanese - those are the two foreign languages that I really want to learn haha. Also, I think your picture in your introductory post is so cute! (:
ReplyDeleteこにちわ! I think it is so great that you are learning Japanese, and yeah, it's very unique! It is nothing like Spanish either, but the sounds are pronounced a lot like the Spanish alphabet. Japanese and Spanish have more softer sounds; even Turkish, which has some harsher vowels, sounds more like the former two than English! Still, it's good you took French - it's better than starting from nothing!
ReplyDelete