scoey53

Not long ago I joined this three dimentional Chat called IMVU. Though it I have not only met many wonderful people who live in Japan, but many others who speak the language well and live elsewhere. I never knew that South America had a large Japanese immigrant population until I met someone from Brazil who was of Japanese decent.

IMVU.com is a great way to meet people and besides the 3 d chat there are various clubs you can join including Japanese music and culture clubs, J-dorama clubs and Japanese language clubs as well. I strongly reccomend it if you want to improve your language skills.

Having studied the Japanese language for nearly 3 years formally and 1 year on my own, I have to say I am knee deep into it. I have over 2,000 japanese songs (Jpop, Jrock, Visul K, J-jazz, J-rap, etc.) on my Ipod, Have a ton of purchased anime, and have enjoyed many hours of J-dorama. Currently watching “Beach Boys” which is alot of fun. I love a good sappy “dorama”.　わたしはどらまがすきですね！

Living in the San Francisco Bay Area and close to one of the largest of three Nihon Machi’s (Japantown. There are three in the entire USA and all in California. SF, San Jose and Los Angeles.) has allowed me to dive deep into Japanese culture without stepping on a plane to Tokyo, although I suspect that will come one of these days hopefully soon.

I have even started learning how to roll my own sushi rolls and have made Onigri a few times. Of course, I don’t limit myself to just Japanese culture, since the area I live in, also harbors probably the largest Asian population in the entire USA. There are many Chinese, Thai, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Indonesian, Taiwanese and many other Asian immigrants here, and so all of their culture, has so deeply enriched Northern California. San Francisco also has the largest Chinatown in the USA and the first Vietnamese community in “Little Saigon” within the heart of the city. If one drives south to Los Angeles there is a large area called “Korean town” as well. Oh, and incase you were wondering, there are great places to eat here as well!!

My friend was telling me he took a course in Japanese language at city college before the summer last year. The class was huge, mostly people who were anime fans, Cosplay fans, and fans of the culture. He told me as weeks went by, people started to drop out, here and there until there were only FIVE people left in the class.

Learning Japanese takes persistance. Its the “gambarimasu” spirit that must drive you. I have been taking Japanese now for three years. I was working on book one for two years, and started book two, but had to drop out for a short time to find employment. If you don’t work with it constantly, you forget things. So when I started back up again, after finding a job, which took several months, I thought the best thing for me to do was not to continue at the level where I had been, but fall back to the first book, with students who were more advanced along with the firt book. I needed to badly reveiw.

I am so glad I have because its helped me enormously and things start to make more sense then they did the first time around.

The best advice anyone can give you is this. If your learning Japanese you have to surround yourself with the culture. Watch movies and J-dorama with english subtitles but listen to what they say in Japanese. (There are places on the net to find Japanese entertainment including Youtube.com) Listen to Japanese music. If you can become familiar with the food, and the culture as much as you can. If you are lucky to live an a city like I do, that has a huge Asian population you are so much the better, but if you can’t you can do things like go to chat rooms where there are Japanese speakers..find yourself a language exchange partner, someone who wants to learn English and is willing to help you with Japanese.

If you really want to learn the language you will, but it won’t be easy. There are so many things to learn besides learning to speak it. Its best to learn to read it and write it as well, which means learning a whole new set of characters. Its not like french, or spanish because you already know the alpha bet.

As the Japanese say, “Do your best…” Gambatte kudasai!