Why I am Learning Japanese

There are a myriad of factors that piqued my interest in Japanese. Initially, I watched a lot of anime and Japanese dramas in middle and high school and became very interested in the culture. Even though I could only understand subtitles, I found the Japanese language to be very lyrical and pleasing to the ears. I also had many Japanese friends in high school, including one guy from Kyoto. One of the biggest reasons (embarrassingly) that I have an interest in Japanese culture is that I also love Japanese food and would eat nabeyaki udon every day if I could.

Not surprisingly, I was strongly discouraged from taking Japanese by my parents. My parents have the immigrant mentality of "practicality", and saw learning Japanese as a frivolous waste of time.  Also, because of the tensions between Japan and China in World War 2, my parents have a wee bit of a bias towards Japanese people. My parents did not like that I watched Japanese shows or wanted to learn Japanese, but now that I'm in college, I have more freedom to choose the classes that I wanted to take. Because of this, I decided to take Japanese purely for fun in my senior year at Columbia.

Although I have a very strong interest in Japanese, I am an Applied Mathematics major, and do not find learning languages an intrinsic skill of mine. It was only after taking Japanese that I became cognizant of how outside my comfort zone I was. Although I try to study hard, I feel that I am still slower than the other students in picking up new phrases and sentence structures. However, I will try my best with practice to speak Japanese well!

I am excited because I will be able to appreciate and understand Japanese shows more and hopefully eventually go to Japan to visit. Just last week, I was able to read a sign that said " ニューヨークすし"　It was pretty cool.