The cancelled Japanese course and my frustration～

When I discovered this career, something that got my attention was that there were courses for other languages besides English. On the official website was said that there were courses for French, Italian, German, Chinese, Corean, Japanese, among others…

I’m really, and I mean really interested in Asian languages, and the one that catches my interest the most is Japanese. I really love Japanese; I love its history, I love how it looks, I love how it sounds and…I really like videogames so, that’s another reason.

I started to study Japanese myself when I was in my last year of high school. In the beginning, it was a bit confusing, but that confusion only lasted like two weeks, and then I could understand how is it that Japanese works (its structure).

When you start learning Japanese the first thing that you must do is to learn its first two basic writing systems: hiragana and katakana (or kana to make it short), so that you can pass to the next level that is kanji. This last one is those typical symbols that we find really difficult at first sight, also kanji literally means Chinese letter.

Japanese is a language that has always got my interest, but if it wasn’t thanks to Duolingo(…yes, Duolingo you heard it right) I wouldn’t have done anything.

Hiragana was pretty easy to memorize and read, the hard part was (and still is) when it comes to write it. Katakana was actually way more easy, but even today, some symbols are difficult for me to write, but not that difficult like hiragana.

These the ones that are hard for me to write by hand:

Hiragana: あ(a)、や(ya)、ら(ra)、れ(re)、ろ(ro)、る(ru)、ね(ne)、れ(re)、め(me)、ぬ(nu)、ゆ(yu)、を(wo)

Katakana: ヤ(ya)、ヌ(nu)、ネ(ne)、シ(shi)、ツ(tsu)、ソ(so)、ン(n)、チ(chi)

You cannot just write all of them the way you want, because each one of them have their own order of strokes. If you don’t know the stroke order, you simply don’t know how to write.

And now, returning to the original subject; I was really excited and motivated that I could finally enter to an actual Japanese class.

I convinced my parents (specially my dad) so that I could enter. I reunited the money and obviously, I was really convinced that I could learn more efficiently and faster.

What was my surprise, when they told me, that only one person (besides me) wanted to enter the course…

Also they told me that they needed at least 10 people to properly start the course…

I got really pessimistic about the whole situation, and I was convinced that it wouldn’t happen… I was just being realistic, like the great Juan Carlos Bodoque in 31 Minutes said: ”I’m not a pessimist Tulio, I’m an optimist, well informed”.

In the end, one Thursday in the evening I got a call from school just to tell me that I could go to take back my money, because no one else besides me and the other person signed into the course…obviously I already expected it, but even so I got a bit sad. In life, you cannot always get what you want.

So, after all of this, I decided that I would continue to study by myself. I’m confident I can do it, even if takes more time, but I will do it…I really want to so…頑張ってます!～ (I’ll do my best!～)

-Rosa de Jesus Hernandez Sayeg