I am a transfer junior from a college in suburb Seattle, Green River College. I am interested in Japanese language and cultures as I am currently taking Japanese class (JAPN 202: Elementary Japanese II), with the aim of enhancing my Japanese to the professional level. To fulfill my desire, besides taking classes and applying for the studying abroad in Japan, I have been attending the Japanese Conversation Table (JCT) every Friday evening since my first semester at the U of I (which is last semester, Fall 2016). This organization is a casual-student-led meeting that everyone who interested in Japan can gather together. At JCT, I have met a lot of people from undergraduate to graduate students and even visiting scholars, from native Japanese …show more content…
Moreover, this is also an opportunity for me to have additional practice and strengthen my comprehension skills in conducting conversations in Japanese. Being a member of JCT not only help me build up connections with other individuals who also have the same interest with me, but also give me a broader perspective of the language as well as its culture through people’s story and experiences. Additionally, I am one of the members in the “Kyushu Buddies” program coordinated by the Center for East-Asian and Pacific Study (CEAPS) and the Engineering Program at Kyushu University. I will help assist exchange students from Kyushu University during their visit at the U of I from February 28 to March 27. There will be some social activity and language exchange events that I believe will contribute to my process of learning …show more content…
It is intriguing to me how we communicate in our mother tongue without having to think about any grammatical rules consciously, but with other learned language, people automatically build up their awareness of the linguistic rules no matter how proficient the person is in that language. Especially the process of learning languages is fascinating as how the mechanisms of implicit learning play a role in language comprehension and production. This curiosity triggers a further interest I have about how to optimize the competency of memory in learning languages. By studying Japanese as my third language, I believe it can help me have a better understanding of my research interest. Furthermore, besides the contribution into my academic, I also have a personal goal in studying Japanese. I love reading as I enjoy further interpreting writing styles and the methods writers used. I thrive to know how different it would be from reading in the original written language to the translated one. Specifically, I have loved Keigo Higashino’s books because of the way he used words to describe the not only the personality traits but also the internal representation of the characters. My inquisitiveness to know the perspective from reading Higashino’s works in Japanese has motivated me to study Japanese. I believe language portraits different characteristics