Video Blog - 私の家族

こんにちは! Brown です. I am excited to learn Japanese so that I can directly interact with one of the great cultures of the world. That includes consuming media like anime and video games and reading original novels by the likes of Haruki Murakami, but also (hopefully) traveling abroad to experience a new sense of place through interactions with a thoroughly modernized but foreign people. I am also taking East Asian Humanities this semester to build a foundation for understanding Japanese philosophy and traditions. I want to use my Japanese to further that understanding.

After the first couple days of class, I am primarily worried about the writing system. I'm not quite sure how to go about studying hiragana and katakana, let alone kanji. It is a daunting task to grasp three scripts and integrate them all into the same sentence. I have heard repeatedly that Japanese grammar is starkly different from that of English, making it especially hard to translate and learn as a native English speaker. Though challenging, I also expect those new grammatical ideas and forms to be an interesting puzzle. Finally, I love the process of discovering a new culture, a process always accompanied by hiccups, faux pas, and silly mistakes. It should be difficult and fun to synthesize Japanese cultural norms and etiquette with my knowledge of the language. じゃまた！