My History with the Japanese Language

So first a little about me. (Warning this is long).

I was first introduced to Japanese when I joined Karate in grade 8. I wanted to join after seeing some movie I downloaded off Napster. My friend convinced me to join his dojo (the style was called "go ju ryu" which is VERY different then the wushu in the video). I didn't realize before I joined but some of the class was taught in Japanese. So through 5 years and a black belt I knew how to SAY many words such as: punch, kick, back, eyes, middle, block... basically parts of the body and fighting verbs. however I had no idea how to write or read these words in Japanese.

Also around grade 8-9 with the newly discovered power of internet and downloading in at my hands I started an anime watching phase. This has died down substantially since then but I still will watch some on rare occasions. (You can bash it all you want but there are a lot with good plots/character development and I still think the GOOD animes (there are a lot of bad) are better than most of the garbage on North American TV, but I digress...) From this I picked out simple phrases that were repeated a lot like baka, urusai, aishiteru... but since I was reading English subtitles I didn't really pick up anything. However I do think this improved my tone/accent/pacing.

Anyways I was looking forward to training in Okinawa (where our head dojo is located) as some of the other people in the dojo had done in the past but it never happened due to some rough finances faced by the dojo. (At least we flew Ei'ichi Miyazato in and I got to train under him twice). About grade 11 or so I got interested enough to do some self study for a year. I learned about the country and taught myself hiragana, katakana and a few Kanji. I printed off grade 1 and 2 Jōyō from http://www.kanjisite.com/index.html and would just train myself occasionally before I went to sleep by writing on paper, and seeing if I remembered by referring to my print off. I got through about halfway through grade 1 and a few grade 2. Of these, I barely remember any now...

Next university came. I went to University of Waterloo (one of the top tech schools in Canada) for Electrical Engineering and needless to say that, in addition my own fun and general student mischief, ate up a lot of my time. I remember telling my roommate in first year how I would learn how to say one random word a day from an English-Japanese dictionary I had. It didn't last long and the the only words I remember from this today are shoe(kutsu) and red(akai). At different stages I've dabbled several things such as kanji gold, mnemosyne, something I coded myself in c++. (more on those next post)

Still something inside me drove me to want to go to Japan. I'm one of those people would feel like I failed if I did not go. I would feel like I had given up on an important childhood goal (in hindsight this would not have been true at all. I think I could have just as easily made a goal for some European country at this point and been just as happy but it's hard to fight your own nature). So to hold myself to this goal I looked into doing an exchange. I figured it was also probably good to have some Japanese on the resume if I was going to get a career related to electrical engineering. I took a first year course at university and looked into doing an exchange to get an "international studies" option on my degree. As part of this I took Japan 101R. I found this course amazing! I learned a lot of nouns, verbs, polite words and my comprehension and speaking skyrocketed. However it was all done in romanji/hiragana so my writing did not improve at all.

Three other things happened to me around this time:
1) I found out that I would have to take classes in full Japanese if I were to do an exchange there. I was finding the coursework hard enough in English so this petrified me.
2) my "international studies" option was forcing me to take all these courses I didn't get anything out of (cultural anthropology, philosophy of the western world,...). Don't get me wrong, there were some courses I liked (macroeconomics) but most of them were only offered during the same time as my inflexible engineering classes. Therefore I would probably have to keep taking courses I didn't really like if I stayed in this option.
3) I found out that I would have to take some useless course about "what I learned overseas" or something like that when I returned.

At this point I decided that all of this was not worth it for some extra words on a piece of paper. I would drop this minor and take international studies and language courses if I could fit them in my schedule. (This turned out to be zero). If not, I would take other courses I actually liked. Even tough I really wanted to take the next level of Japanese and was even willing to take it as an extra course on top of my already full course load, its classes were always during my lab time.

Yet, I still couldn't let go of that desire to visit Japan. I figured with the amount of time and effort I had put in already, I wouldn't be satisfied with a 1-2 week vacation there. I would have to go after graduation, on my own terms. I knew I would never commit seriously enough to gain a decent level of proficiency/fluency unless I lived in the country.

Well I've now graduated (whaoo!) and through the 9 or so years I've been on this journey I've been able to visit 14 countries in Europe (2 of which I have been able to work for a month) and I have seen about 13 states in USA. Through theses years I have also discovered that my calling in life is to teach, likely at a university level. So I doubt I will end up staying in Japan, but we'll just have to wait and see. I'm sure that my passion for education and science is what is motivating me to do this blog. Basically this is one big experiment with me as the guinea pig.

I hope it gives you greater insight to me, my current level of Japanese, and how I got there. I have just recently gotten a job teaching English to children aged 6-10 years old for a year starting in January. I still have a few weeks before I know where I will be placed. I got back into studying Japanese starting in late September 2010 with my intensity ranging from medium to high since then.