How I learnt Japanese ~ My story on why I started studying Japanese

Hi everyone!

I always have a habit of posting videos on Youtube but I never end up blogging about it. I always want to because I always have things I want to say in videos but then I don't since I do have a bad memory lol, and I always want to elaborate more after reading comments people post. So from now on, I will try and do this more often!

For those of you who don't know, I have started a new series on my channel where you guys send me questions to my email:

kimdaoquestions@gmail.com

and I will answer them in a video format. I initially wanted to make this a weekly segment, but because work and uni got too busy, I don't really have time to do it that often :( Because I received a lot of emails regarding how I learnt Japanese, I decided to make a video dedicated on just that.

I started learning Japanese in 2009 when I was a second year at university. It was kind of on an impulse. I've always wanted to learn Japanese since I was in highschool, but my highschool didn't offer Japanese as a subject. Back when I was around 13, I got interested in Japanese anime, dramas and Jpop. I tried teaching myself Japanese but I gave up after a while since it was too hard. At university, I made some friends with people who were studying Japanese. All of them loved it and encouraged me to take it during my first year. I wasn't able to because of prerequisites, the professor told me to wait until the year after to take Japanese.

I then studied Japanese in my second year of university. I was initially only planning on taking 1-2 units of Japanese for fun, back then I was doing a Genetics/Chemistry major. As I kept learning more Japanese, I realized it was the class I always looked forward to, and it was the most fun I've had at university. I didn't want to stop learning Japanese so I ended up changing my major to Japanese and Psychology. My parents weren't happy with my choice at all, but I knew that I wanted to do Japanese so I stuck with it.

Back in highschool, I used to love studying music. I was playing the piano for 10 years, and I really loved composing my own music. While I was still playing piano, I won many awards and I felt like it was what I wanted to continue in the future. Unfortunately my parents didn't like it and I had to end up giving up what I loved doing. The same thing happened with Japanese, but this time, I wasn't willing to give up easy. In the end they were the ones who gave up and let me do what I wanted. I will say now, I have not regretted learning Japanese, not once.

Learning Japanese has bought many new opportunities to me and it has changed my life completely. I was a regular at a Japanese culture club in our university, that's where I met my boyfriend and the people I hang around with the most. I met many good friends there and we regularly travel to Japan together.

Although Japanese is super fun to learn, I have to be honest.. It's not an easy language to learn. In the Japanese language, there is pretty much 3 different alphabets. Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana are easy to learn, but Kanji is really hard, especially if you're not Chinese or don't know how to read Chinese. In the video below I talk about how I study Japanese and give some study tips~




Pretty much what I want to tell you guys is, if you want to do something, go for it.


I hope this blog post is somewhat helpful and gives some of you guys inspiration if you are wanting to learn Japanese. Also I apologize if this blog post makes no sense. I'm extremely sleepy after I finished work tonight and I really need sleep now lol.