こんにちは！私の名前はマリナです。

I’m Marina, and like many others, I decided to take advantage of the lovely Tofugu New Year’s sale to refocus on Japanese. My reasons for learning the language are several: I want to be able to consume native Japanese media and entertainment, I plan on living in Japan for at least year at some point in the future, and I find the language fascinatingly different from Romantic languages (I speak French at close-to-fluent levels). The more ‘grounded’ or ‘tangible’ goal I’d like to reach is to be able to read my copy of Final Fantasy VII Ultimania Omega, including the mini-story and detailed character analyses in the back.

My interest in the language and country has evolved. At a young age it was manifested in my love of Japanese videogame series like Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy, and then anime and manga. While I still hold those passions, I have also become much more interested in Japanese traditional and pop culture and, Shintoism, the writing systems of the language, and Japanese history.

I originally took three years of Japanese in highschool, and didn’t walk away with much beyond 250 kanji, a handful of vocab, and the most basic of grammar. The past two and a half years of university have shown occasional success in my quest to self-teach myself the language, dotted amongst many failures and a lot of forgetting. This summer I started using Heisig’s incredible RTK program for Kanji, and I’ve learned an additional 200 kanji thus far to what I knew. I haven’t been consistent daily, but I plan for that to change this semester so I can tackle much more kanji.

Overall, I’m very eager to end my days of being a slacker and get back on the track to winning at Japanese!

• This topic was modified 12 years, 5 months ago by  マリナ.