Why?!

Because I have been studying Chinese for a couple years, I used to always make fun of my friends who took or who wanted to learn Japanese.  China and Chinese just seemed so much better.  I made fun of their pathetic little islands and how made up the language looked compared to Chinese (Japanese looks like it is made up the night before; I stand by that).   Japanese was a language of confusing little squiggles, impossibly long words, and an economically stagnant country.  Ha! Why would anyone waste their time!

And now here I am.  Wasting my time learning the squiggle language.  Deep down I think I always knew that I would one day learn Japanese.  And I so strongly argued against its practicality in order to convince myself that I had to resist the urge! The lady, after all, did protest a bit too much. Maybe it was the urge to watch anime without subtitles, the urge to eat sushi all day long, or the practical excuse I gave myself that I needed to diversify my East Asian Language portfolio to stand out from other undergrads.  Whatever the reason, here I am!  I am excited and scared to see what this beautiful and complicated language has to throw at me, and to deepen my understanding of a very important country (still number three economically, after all...).