Michael Ward, who works in Japan, talks about studying Japanese

I chose Japanese as my foreign language class because I was (and still am) a huge fan of Japanese video games and Japanese music. At the time, I didn’t have any aspirations to live in Japan or anything like that, but when it came down to a choice in languages, I had also already taken one year of Spanish, and wanted to try something new and completely different from English. I was at least somewhat interested in Japanese, so the choice was obvious.

Being able to choose to study Japanese in high school ultimately shaped my life as it is today. Because of a Japanese class with an active Japanese cultural club, I was able to participate in a variety of activities and competitions, such as placing third at the national level of the Japan Bowl competition, which is an accomplishment that I still leave on my resume today, as well as host exchange students, and ultimately in my senior year, be an exchange student myself. Over the past decade since beginning Japanese, I have made an extraordinary number of friends as well as developed an international network of contacts. I now live and work in Japan, so for me the biggest benefit of taking Japanese in high school was that it gave me a goal to work towards as I became an adult, and also taught me to communicate with the people with whom I now work.

Most people have the idea that Japanese is hard. I can’t stress how much of a misconception this is. Sure, some students will have a harder time than others (just like any subject of any grade), but Japanese is not some mystical magical language. As someone who took another language before Japanese, I can say it is no different in terms of difficulty than learning Spanish or German or anything else. The fear of failing at something before you’ve even started is what holds people back from a lot of things. If you’re interested in taking Japanese but are afraid of failing or it being too hard, this is your chance to try and accomplish something you think is out of your reach. I think you will soon find that not only is it entirely possible to learn Japanese, but it’s also extremely fun and rewarding.

(February 2010)