Getting Back Into It
Welcome to 勉強中, my blog about learning Japanese. I hope to use this space for a few different purposes – to help beginner to intermediate students of Japanese structure their learning effectively, to get feedback on my own study techniques from other learners, to collect interesting links and neat Japanese websites, and to help motivate myself to keep at it.
Who Am I?
Me on top of Japan
My name is shaydwyrm, a name which has a long and illustrious history dating back to the day in elementary school when I thought I had come up with an awesome Battle.net screen name and then mangled the spelling because someone had already taken it. As you might expect from that, chief among my hobbies is video gaming, followed by (in no particular order) Go, Ultimate, Guitar, Anime, and of course Japanese language.
I am a recent MIT graduate, where I did my humanities concentration in Japanese language. This involved taking two years of language classes, which took me three years to finish on account of not being able to wake up in time for half of them. Still, repeating a year of classes really made sure I had nailed down the fundamentals, so maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing.
It wasn’t until after I graduated though that my Japanese really took off. Through a university program I found a one year internship at Merck‘s Tsukuba Research Institute (now closing, sadly :-(), and spent the summer in intense study-mode preparing to ship off to the island. Sadly, despite the college classes and my extra study, on arrival I found my Japanese to be pretty woeful. I needn’t have worried overly much though – communication was rough at times, but by the end of the year I could talk my way through pretty much any situation, and on select topics of personal interest (Go, Food, Sake) I could sound pretty fluent.
Last August I returned to the US and plunged headfirst into the failing economy. Due to a number of different factors I was unable to find work for a while, so I did what any self-respecting out-of-work video game junkie would do – I reopened my World of Warcraft account.
Fast forward almost a year hovering around zero productivity, and I’ve finally gotten back on the wagon. Suddenly swimming in free time and slightly twitchy from missing my daily raiding fix, I’ve started reopening all my dusty Japanese resources and flexing my atrophied language skills.
This blog, should I prove able to continue updating it, will follow my attempts to polish my skills at reading and understanding Japanese in all contexts. I am happy to accept any questions or comments on any post, and if I can’t help you out I will do my best to direct you to someone who can!
勉強中 