Hello!

Hi Everyone!

This is my first English posting on my Japanese blog, and since I am quite a bit more facile with English than with Japanese, here is my opportunity to tell you all why I am studying Japanese, as well as what my thoughts are about this class and my progress so far.

I have wanted to study Japanese for a very long time, as I think it is a beautiful and very interesting language. To be able to write and converse in such a complex language will be so amazing, so I am studying hard to get to that point as soon as I can. It's been a somewhat difficult journey so far (as we often say in class, "にほんごのクラスはとてもむずかしです"), but the time and effort that is required both inside class and out are well worth it, as I can feel myself progressing (albeit somewhat slowly) toward my ultimate goal: fluency.

Friends and acquaintances tend to ask, "Why Japanese and not some other language?" My answer to them is this: For me, the study of language is not simply to know the language and be able to use it in social and (as is so popular these days) business climates, but rather to understand the entire culture of the people who speak it. Japanese history and culture are fascinating to me, and someday I hope to live in Japan. And while it is certainly possible to live in another country and get by only speaking English, speaking the native tongue allows you to experience that country like someone who truly lives there as opposed to an outsider.

Another topic that tends to pop up when I tell people I meet that I am taking Japanese is: "Wow! Isn't that hard? I hear that class is really intense." And they are right. Studying Japanese is not without its frustrations, especially as a native English speaker, since the language is so different from my own and from any others that I have studied. Since I have to acquire not only the words but also the grammatical structures that comprise Japanese, it has been no easy task to progress from pure memorization and stringing sentences together to actually "speaking Japanese." There is a fundamental difference between being able to remember what words mean and what the grammar rules are and being able to speak and think in the language itself. At this point, my biggest frustration comes from my feeling that I am in something of a transitional phase between merely understanding and truly speaking: I find myself following Hamada-sensei's advice to "think in English" more often than I would like. But the good news is that as I progress, this happens less and less, and when I can finally think purely in Japanese when I wish to speak it, I will truly be able to say, "にほんごをはなします。”