Why I Am Studying Japanese

Why I am learning Japanese

I am learning Japanese because most of my mother's side of the family lives in Tokyo and speak Japanese.  I want to be able to communicate better with them, and eventually live in Japan for some amount of time to get to know them better and maybe to teach English and learn Japanese art history at University there.  

 I also love Japanese culture, especially Japanese food (who doesn't?). 

I am excited to be able to hold conversations in Japanese.  I have found that difficult but it definitely gets easier with practice.  I have also had some difficult learning hiragana (one of Japanese's alphabet) and associating the characters with sounds.  I hope that eventually I can look at a character and automatically associate it with a sound rather than think of it in terms of Roman letters.  I am thankful that there are no conjugations in Japanese! I am excited to learned Kanji and Katakana, I think the characters are very beautiful.