I decided to study Japanese  because I was stationed in Tokyo for three years but never had the chance to learn the writing system. I don't like not knowing things, and not knowing how to read Japanese after three years of living there is rather frustrating. My stubbornness won out and i decided to study Japanese as my language here at Columbia University.

I'm excited to be able to read and write Japanese so I can speak with my friends back in Japan in their native tongue. Learning will also help me next time I take a trip to Japan, which I am hoping to do soon. I miss curry so much.

Coming in I had a decent grasp of common phrases from my time in Tokyo, but they were just space-fillers to be polite, keep me alive, and find my way around. Now that I'm learning more phrases and words, I can already tell I have a much better understanding of the language. The hardest thing for me so far is easily the characters for hiragana, soon katakana, and later kanji. I already know katakana and kanji are going to be difficult for me because I don't learn as fast as I used to, but I refuse to give up! I've developed a reasonably decent initial grasp on hiragana now, so repetition will be the key to mastery with that, and katakana and kanji will follow after.