Bahasa Go!

It started on the 4th of July 2004.

It started when I touched down Tokyo on that wet hot summer day.

That day I came as a foreign student, with only 3 months of language preparation. Not on Japanese, but on English!

Why? You would ask. Because I was not going to study in Japanese. I was enrolled in an international program with everything conducted in English. So when I touched down Tokyo, my Japanese was zero.

How it started

And so I started another 3-month-long language orientation, this time on Japanese. During this three months I found no difficulties living in Tokyo with zero level Japanese.

The orientation was held in a well-known private university in Tokyo. Our text book was the standard Minna no Nihonggo.

After three months of learning, I was able to read hiragana and katakana, and how to have simple daily conversations in Japanese. But if I had to go places where it needed Japanese, I would have a professional translator helping me. So I basically didn’t need Japanese at all!

Learning Hiragana and Katakana

Learning Hiragana and Katakana at the language orientation was not my first encounter with Japanese though.

When I was in college, I was living in a boarding house with a homestay family. The daughter of the family, like a year or two younger than me was apparently learning Japanese. I was not really interested in Japanese or Japan in general, until I saw almost all things around the house had labels with cute writings on it.

That was Kanji!

I was curious with the characters, so I asked her about them. She told me about the Japanese Language in brief. Before learning how to read those cute letters, I should learn Hiragana and Katakana first. She told me that while handing me two printouts.

The next thing I did was enrolling myself in a Japanese language class!

Culture First, Language Next

Too bad I didn’t make much progress learning Japanese then.

But my interest in Japanese culture started growing. I gave up going to the Japanese language class, and started going to the Japanese Foundation instead. I spent many hours on the weekend reading Japanese novels at its library, sometimes watched Japanese movies, and visited Japanese Art Exhibitions.

Although I was interested in the culture, and dreamed of being able to speak the language, I knew that Japanese was almost impossible for me.

So when I had a chance to apply for a Japanese scholarship, I carefully chose one with English program.

My yearning for mastering Japanese never stopped though, and that is why I am still learning Japanese today, 20 years later!