First Post?!

はじめまして。ロオラです。どうぞよろしく。わたしはノトルダムだいがのにねんせいのがくせいです。アメリカジンです。コネチカットのダンブリからきました。せんこうわはきしとにほんごです。

Hey everyone,

I’ve always been interested in Asian culture because of my half-Chinese heritage- probably the highlight of kindergarten through third grade was my mom’s Chinese New Year puppet shows using Sesame Street characters. My family has been in the US for long enough though that being Chinese was never an important part of my life…which is probably why I’m choosing to take Japanese over Chinese. -__-;

So embarrassingly enough it was Yu-Gi-Oh! that got me into Japanese culture (I have nothing to say about this other than that you have no idea how incredibly addicting that show is), though cartoons were and still are more or less the only shows that I watch on TV. From there I branched out into Hayao Miyazaki and his amazing amazing movies. I’m slightly ashamed to say that the first one I saw was Howl’s Moving Castle, but I was absolutely hooked on Miyazaki’s movies from that day on. Since then I’ve watched quite a few anime series, a couple of dramas, and have become addicted to Japanese pop and rock music—though really, I love listening to any kind of foreign music. Gradually this interest in pop culture led me to want to learn as much about Japanese culture and history as possible.

The class is going pretty smoothly for me so far, though my biggest challenge is in reading and comprehension, my brain kind of just shuts down when it sees long strings of hiragana. Anyway, I’m really excited to be (finally!) learning the language!

～ロオラ