Studying Japanese at Tufts
Hello everyone!
My name is Uyen (pronounced oo-ween) and I wanted to share my experience with Tufts’ Japanese department in Japanese. I was born in Vietnam and moved to the US when I was 8. I currently live in Boston and I am writing this from my dorm in Medford, MA.
My interest in Japanese came from watching anime when I was younger in Vietnam. As a kid, I watched shows like Inuyasha, Sailor Moon, and Cowboy Bebop every morning while eating breakfast. I always tried to copy the Japanese sentences for fun!
I continued to watch anime and read manga after leaving Vietnam. Some of my favorite shows currently are Natsume Yuujinchou (Natsume’s Book of Friends), Haikyuu!!, and Fruits Basket. I was always interested in learning Japanese for the language aspect in high school but never got the opportunity. When I was accepted to Tufts, I was super excited to be taking Japanese for the first time. On the first day of class in Japanese 1, I remember being super nervous and really scared that I would never be able to learn the language. Vietnamese does not use characters, so the hiragana/katakana really confused me. The kanji especially was difficult for me to learn. And still to this day I struggle with memorizing kanji.
The Tufts Japanese classes usually have about 12-15 people, so it was easy to make friends in class. Every day I sit down in class, we greet each other by saying “ohayou gozaimasu” or “konnichiwa.” I turn to my partner and ask them in Japanese about their weekend plans, laugh over funny stories, and talk about their day thus far. Because learning a language is all about speaking, I spend most of the class speaking to my partners or answering questions from my professor. In the beginning, it was really scary to speak out loud. I was scared to sound weird or get grammar wrong.
The Japanese department also has culture and literature classes. Some examples of classes are “Post-war Japanese literature,” “Nothingness,” and “The World of Hayao Miyazaki.” The Japanese department is smaller compared to other language and academic departments, so I got the chance to get very close to my professors. I go to office hours to ask for help on difficult questions, get explanations of some confusing grammar, and to chat about my life. I even once went to go eat Vietnamese food with my sophomore year Japanese professor, Koizumi sensei!
The connections that I have made with friends and professors in the Japanese department are precious to me. I am learning how to speak, write, and read in Japanese but also am learning how to learn from my failures. I am excited to learn more Japanese and one day study abroad in Japan!
Thank you for reading, and thank you to Yagi sensei for editing this in Japanese for me.
Bye,
Uyen
Photo Credit: https://www.tofugu.com/learn-japanese/