日本語 (Japanese)

I was cleaning up my room for the New Year and about to wipe off my calender, when I decided that my exam schedule looked kind of pretty and I should take a picture to remember it.  So this is my poor attempt at an "artistic" photo.

I haven't spoken much about my love of Japan.  Now it's not all about having been an anime otaku back in my middle school days.  Actually, after 9th grade, I really didn't watch much TV in general.  So when I told my parents that I was going to take Japanese my freshman year of college, it came to them as quite a shock for a couple of different reasons.  The first of which stemming from the fact that I was terrible at languages in high school.

I studied Spanish for three years in high school and was so terrible that my teacher deemed me "incapable of learning another language."  I was doomed to become another statistic as an ingorant mono-lingual American.  This fear was confirmed when I miserably failed my Spanish placement test during orienatation at USC.  When I met with my adviser, I had to choices:

1. I could to take three semesters of college level Spanish to meet the proficiency level required by the Honors College.
2. I could take two semesters of a "critical language" with a lower proficiency (i.e. Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, etc.)

Well seeing as how I didn't want to deal with another Spanish class in my life AND wanted to do the minimum amount of foreign language possible, I opted for Option 2.  The only language that fit comfortably in my schedule was Japanese, Honors, Baba-sensei.

Thus my parents were a little shocked and concerned when I informed them of my choice to study the most difficult language for a native English speaker.  "It's only for two semesters," I said.  Little did I know how much it would rock my world.

The first day of class was terrifying.  I couldn't understand my teacher's accent.  I didn't know any of the characters and there were some students who had self studied and were really advanced for our level.  It was bit overwhelming and I was convinced I would drop the class.  So I went and met with Baba-sensei, who told me that it was only the first couple of days of class and I should wait a little bit longer before deciding since the drop/add date was still a week away.

"Study this weekend. Get one chapter ahead and then tell me if you want to drop the class or not," was her advice to me.  I studied really hard for that weekend and taught myself all the basic hiragana characters so I could read most things in the beginning part of the book.  And all of a sudden things just started to click.

All of sudden, I'm in my second semester and applying for study abroad to go to Japan for the summer.  I was awarded a prestigious Boren to help fund my travel.  Those nine weeks in Japan changed my life in so many ways.  For the first time I was a minority and in a country where English was not the native language.  People kept staring at me and I didn't even know how to ask them, "Hey, what you lookin' at?"

But I learned so much!  I completely immersed myself and even joined the basketball team (I'm front and center with the basketball):

My poor friend Malia only came to practice twice and didn't quite catch the memo that we were crossing our arms for the picture.  But at least she looks cute!

I learned more from my friends than I ever did in the classroom, which is saying a lot because I spent 9 hours a week in class and about 15 hours outside of class doing homework.  Add 9 hours a week for basketball and that means I was doing 33 hours of Japanese a week, not to mention all my random Japenglish conversations I had with my awesome friends in the dorm:

This is us eating at my favourite Korean BBQ restaurant ever with a couple of my friends.  This was only one of seven courses.  But fourteen hungry college girls are more than capable of finishing off this mountain of food, no worries.

So that's a little bit about my trip to Japan.  I wish I'd had this blog while I was abroad.  But I'm sure I'll be hit with stints of nostalgia and I'll post more pictures from my travels to Beppu, Kyoto, Osaka and Tokyo. 

But the overall point of this post was to show that even failure can put you on the path to a dream you didn't even know existed.  I would have never thought I'd want to become fluent in Japanese or maybe even work or live there one day, but now the options are endless.  I love Japan not only for the language, culture and people but because of what it's come to mean to me as overcoming something everyone (including myself) thought was impossible.