Writing Self Introduction （さくぶん１）(◕‿◕)

はじめまして。わたしはジェニー・リーです。アメリカじんです。ちゅうごくからきました。がくせいです。コロンビアだいがくのさんねんせいです。はたちです。どうぞよろしくおねがいしまう。


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I'm studying Japanese for two main reasons. First, I chose Japanese as my language fulfillment for the Linguistics major at Columbia because students are not allowed to study Romantic, Germanic, or their native languages. I'm excited to learn about the grammatical structure and sociolinguistic aspects of the Japanese language (especially when it comes to polite and more colloquial versions of certain words or phrases). I'm also fascinated in the overlap between Chinese characters and Kanji in Japanese and want to explore the reasons why certain characters are shared between the two languages and why divergences occurred in the sounds of the respective languages. 

The second reason for my choice is that I've been interested in the Japanese language and in Japanese culture for many years. I became interested in anime at a young age and grew up drawing my favorite characters from different television shows. I'm also an avid consumer of manga and animated films (especially Studio Ghibli productions) and love having conversations about the differences between Western and Eastern media. I hope that my language experiences in Japanese will allow me to read my favorite forms of media in the original language of their creation thereby giving me a deeper appreciation for the material. I'm also deeply attached to Haruki Murakami's written works and I hope that I can one day learn enough Japanese to read his books in Japanese. I would also love to explore Japanese poetry and get a sense of literary aesthetics in Japanese poetic production vs. Chinese poetic production and gauge their differences when compared to Western poetry and prose. 

As for the difficult aspects of Japanese, I think that the written components will be very difficult. Although we've finished learning Hiragana, I've never been exposed to Katakana or Kanji before and am worried that I'll be confused about when to use Kanji and when to use Hiragana. I'm glad that verb conjugation in Japanese and relatively straightforward (although I'm a little worried we might run into irregular verb forms) and am excited to learn more verbs so that I can communicate a broader variety of ideas. Learning pronunciation for different words (rising and falling sounds) also concerns me but I hope that with practice, I can improve quickly! So far, I love my exposure to the language and really enjoy the class and witnessing my slow improvement and intake of words, phrases, and grammatical structures.