Critical Need Language Award: Personal Statement

It is my wish to be considered for the Critical Need Language Award. I have been learning the Japanese language since the fall semester of 2017, at Florida International University. The course provided me with the basic, formal, expressions used in Japan, as well as their alphabets: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. I will be joining the Intensive Language and Culture in Kyoto program, taking place in the summer of 2018. It will last approximately five weeks, beginning in May and ending in June. I currently have a GPA of 3.56 and intend to keep doing even better in my studies. I am also a full-time student and a part-time job worker. This semester, I am taking Japanese II, where I will continue learning other common Japanese expressions, cultural

They are well known for creating an art style that is so unique, it is seen and easily recognized all over the world. This art style is known as anime or animation. It is often confused as being aimed towards a young target, such as children, but the great aspect about anime is that there are deep storylines that relate to every age group. When I was a child, I would spend hours watching anime and comparing it to the cartoons my peers and I were used to seeing on our own screens. The Japanese cartoons seemed to contain more colors, more diverse stories, and beautiful art to match. This inspired me to practice drawing this style, little by little. It was not until my last year of high school that I decided to truly teach myself how to learn this art form. From then until now, my passion for everything artistic has grown tremendously, thanks to the inspiration I obtained from anime. Those events led to my starting to watch Japanese series, which made me curious about Japanese life and brought me to the conclusion that I want to know more about this colorful

There is no other place that will help me learn, practice, and further improve my Japanese than in Japan itself. I would be residing with Japanese natives every day. This would mean that I would get to eat with them, see their preferences with food, their eating habits, and their dislikes. That I would get to study with them, see how well they do in their courses, how they interact with their classmates and peers. It would also mean that I would get the best pronunciation examples to words I have learned, or have not yet and will just by listening, and would mimic them to the best of my abilities, improving in this way my own use of the Japanese language. All of these factors would help me not only with the language, but with comparing how Japanese lives differ from my own back home. It will help me gain an insight as to what it is like to experience life where others experience it and how they experience