Integrative Narrative
My Japanese language and culture learning journey began during the summer before my freshman year of high school.
My whole life I've grown up in a predominantly Asian area, therefore my high school offered Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish as its foreign language options. My best friend, Katie, and I had recently taken a strong liking to anime at the time, so when we saw that there was a Japanese class option we were ecstatic. However, I did have to put up a fight with my parents as they wanted me to take Spanish so I could communicate with my abuelitos more. After joining the class, I realized that I was actually picking up the language at a decent pace and that my grades in the class were relatively high. My teacher, Eiji Yano, was also fantastic at his job and really encouraged us as students to have fun with our learning through the usage of grammar and language based games, songs, and inviting Japanese high school and college students to come interact with us. Now I never originally planned to go to college or use Japanese language and culture in a career, but during my junior year of high school my teacher sat me down and encourage me to pursue it as he thought it would make my happy. I had been doing extremely well in the class due to his teaching style and the fact that my school had the same classes/6 periods everyday; leading to me using Japanese every day for 3 years at the time. Although, after this, I made it my goal to become even better at Japanese and try to become a translator no matter what college I went to.
Throughout college I have felt the most confident and proud in my ability to connect with the Japanese exchange students and not shy away from practicing my Japanese with them (MLO 1). My Japanese language and communication skills before use to be very good, however due to the COVID 19 outbreak they did deteriorate a decent amount due to me using only English and Spanish in my every day life for 2 years. Therefore, I believe in this area I need to improve a lot. I am also very proud of my growth in the cultural area (MLO2) as I currently have a job offer due to my knowledge in Japanese culture specifically. I hope in the future to continue growing my knowledge in this area by visiting Japan for extended periods of time. CSUMB has also helped me better understand my own culture, Mexican, by having us take secondary culture classes (MLO3). This is something I'd also like to gain more knowledge in as I did not grow up around my own heritage much. By requiring us Japanese majors to partake in the capstone we also are taking steps to improve our skills in research and technology (MLO4), which is essential to our future careers. All in all, college has provided me with an opportunity to immerse myself in Japanese language and culture and internalize it in a way I did not think possible (MLO5).
My whole life I've grown up in a predominantly Asian area, therefore my high school offered Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish as its foreign language options. My best friend, Katie, and I had recently taken a strong liking to anime at the time, so when we saw that there was a Japanese class option we were ecstatic. However, I did have to put up a fight with my parents as they wanted me to take Spanish so I could communicate with my abuelitos more. After joining the class, I realized that I was actually picking up the language at a decent pace and that my grades in the class were relatively high. My teacher, Eiji Yano, was also fantastic at his job and really encouraged us as students to have fun with our learning through the usage of grammar and language based games, songs, and inviting Japanese high school and college students to come interact with us. Now I never originally planned to go to college or use Japanese language and culture in a career, but during my junior year of high school my teacher sat me down and encourage me to pursue it as he thought it would make my happy. I had been doing extremely well in the class due to his teaching style and the fact that my school had the same classes/6 periods everyday; leading to me using Japanese every day for 3 years at the time. Although, after this, I made it my goal to become even better at Japanese and try to become a translator no matter what college I went to.
Throughout college I have felt the most confident and proud in my ability to connect with the Japanese exchange students and not shy away from practicing my Japanese with them (MLO 1). My Japanese language and communication skills before use to be very good, however due to the COVID 19 outbreak they did deteriorate a decent amount due to me using only English and Spanish in my every day life for 2 years. Therefore, I believe in this area I need to improve a lot. I am also very proud of my growth in the cultural area (MLO2) as I currently have a job offer due to my knowledge in Japanese culture specifically. I hope in the future to continue growing my knowledge in this area by visiting Japan for extended periods of time. CSUMB has also helped me better understand my own culture, Mexican, by having us take secondary culture classes (MLO3). This is something I'd also like to gain more knowledge in as I did not grow up around my own heritage much. By requiring us Japanese majors to partake in the capstone we also are taking steps to improve our skills in research and technology (MLO4), which is essential to our future careers. All in all, college has provided me with an opportunity to immerse myself in Japanese language and culture and internalize it in a way I did not think possible (MLO5).