My interest in Japan began somewhere around junior year of high school. At my all-girls boarding school, we had many international students from Asia, and I had a close friend and roommate from Japan, named Yukiko. I often helped Yukiko with her English homework, so in exchange, she started teaching me Japanese. We had lessons together on the weekends for most of my senior year. Yukiko does Japanese calligraphy, so her kanji, hiragana and katakana are beautiful, so I loved learning them from her.I'm extremely grateful to Yukiko for everything she taught me, but it was difficult for her to explain gramm
ar (since she knew it intuitively, not by grammar rules,) and we conversed almost entirely in informal, 16-year-old girl Japanese. Last summer, I went to Tokyo for four weeks in June and lived with a host family while taking Japanese classes, where I got a chance to learn more of the essentials of grammar. My host family (on the right are Tomoko-san and Satsuki, my host mother and her 9-month-old daughter) were very welcoming and I had a great experience . I'm now a rising sophomore and have just completed L4 Japanese at Yale.
ar (since she knew it intuitively, not by grammar rules,) and we conversed almost entirely in informal, 16-year-old girl Japanese. Last summer, I went to Tokyo for four weeks in June and lived with a host family while taking Japanese classes, where I got a chance to learn more of the essentials of grammar. My host family (on the right are Tomoko-san and Satsuki, my host mother and her 9-month-old daughter) were very welcoming and I had a great experience . I'm now a rising sophomore and have just completed L4 Japanese at Yale.Thanks to the Light Fellowship, from June until August I'll be in Hakodate studying at the Hokkaido International Foundation's summer program. For reference, I google maps'd the city:
I just got my host family information from HIF, and I'm excited to meet them (after the hotel quarantine to protect against swine flu, aka, 豚インフルエンザ.) I'm also really excited to see Hakodate and eat some delicious fresh seafood, especially squid and crab.
In terms of Japanese, I'm looking forward to improving my fluency, and I'm particularly hoping by the end of the summer to have overcome the inevitable mid-sentence pause in which I try to figure out how to end the verb I'm trying to use, especially when using the more difficult tenses. I'm not sure where my current grasp of kanji puts me in terms of ability to navigate everyday life in Japan, but I'm sure it will be significantly easier than last summer considering how much I've learned in the past two semesters (thanks to Seto-sensei and Maruyama-sensei!)
I'll be leaving New York on the 8th of June and arriving a day early in Tokyo to meet up with some high school friends who are there currently. I also bought my JR pass exchange ticket, so I hope to be able to travel around Japan for a week or so after the program ends.
I still have a lot of studying, organizing and packing to do in the next 10 days, but I hope to update regularly once I get to Hakodate!
