Madeline Locke, a student at Earlham College in Indiana, talks about her reason for studying Japanese


When I first started studying Japanese in high school, I did it because I wanted to read manga and watch anime in its original form. I think this is the main reason for many students when they pick Japanese over, say, Spanish or French. However, it did not take very long for me to forget my original reasons for entering Japanese 101 and instead become immersed in what I realized was a very complex and beautiful language. I continued to study Japanese for three years in high school, and am now in my 5th year at college.

I think one of the best things you get out of studying a language is being able to communicate with other native speakers. Japanese is no exception. Using what I had learned in the classroom and applying it to real-life conversations was a great way for me to make friends with the Japanese exchange students here at my college. It opened a new door to a culture and people that were completely different from my own. The students I met were some of the nicest people to talk to, and they were always thrilled (and usually relieved) when they realized you could speak a little of their language. Helping them learn English and having them help me with my Japanese taught me things I could never learn in a classroom. It also taught me about my own culture and language, especially when I helped them with their homework and struggled to try and explain the meaning of “quiet as a mouse” or “eating like a horse.” Overall, it’s definitely been the friends I’ve made from Japan that have been the best thing about studying the language.

As languages go, English and Japanese couldn’t be more different. The writing systems are nothing alike; the ways of speaking and the pronunciations are nothing alike; and the grammar structure and the order of sentences are nothing alike. A good way to approach learning Japanese is to treat it like a puzzle, figuring out which words go where, putting particles in the right place, etc. Japanese is also about repetition. Lots and lots of repetition. After memorizing the two basic alphabets you then find there are thousands more kanji that need to be mastered in order to fully be able to read and write.

Speaking from experience, you WILL have a love/hate relationship with kanji. This may sound very discouraging, but after a while it will become routine, learning the way everything is written in its proper order, learning its history and the way it fits into sentences. The important thing is to not get frustrated, and to not get behind with memorization. The more you study the easier and easier it will become to see how the language functions on a higher level of thinking.

(February 2010)