My Story

Kenrokuen

I was born in the state of Vermont, in the USA in the year of 1985.  I grew up enjoying school and took an early interest in languages when I studied Spanish for four years in middle school and high school.  I ended quitting Spanish because, while my grades were quite good, I had no relationship to Spanish-speaking culture, and no internal motivation to continue learning.

I then went and attended Saint Michael`s College in Vermont, where in addition to studying philosophy, religious studies, and East Asian studies, I began studying Japanese with Hideko Furukawa.  My whole life was spent in the state of Vermont until my last year of college, when I went and studied abroad in Japan under Furukawa-sensei`s recommendation.  This was probably the most influential decision of my life.

I studied abroad at Kansai Gaidai University in Hirakata-shi, a school well-known for its language and study abroad programs.  The experience and relationships that I formed motivated me to come back to Japan in the future.  While I got better at Japanese during this time, I still knew very little, only at most 300 kanji and my skills were otherwise abysmal.

I was back in the States, not knowing how I`d get better at the language.  Then, I met a girl at Saint Michael`s College who would later become my fiancé.  She was from Japan, and after her study abroad trip was over, I sometimes made trips to Japan to continue the relationship during my summer breaks from my master`s degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.  During that time, my Japanese skills had not increased at all.

I was frustrated.  It had now been four years since I had started my first class in Japanese, and I still knew almost nothing, but I had planned on moving to Japan.  However, I didn`t have a lot of money and I didn`t know what I should do to improve.  Then, by accident, I found All Japanese All the Time, written by a man named Khatzumoto, who self-taught himself Japanese to fluency and got himself a job in Japan in a year and a half.

This was amazing.  I was in grad school trying to learn how to become a teacher, but I had not realized how simple the solution to learning a language was.  Treating a language as something that should be practiced joyfully and not studied seemed to be the ideal answer to successfully learning a language.

The first year of my studies from that point, I was living in America, and my Japanese still became ridiculously good.  I was working as a Resident Director of Student Life at my alma mater, a job which has a very hectic schedule, but I was still outperforming my expectations and worked heavily with Japanese exchange students on campus.

In two years I had gone from knowing almost nothing and now I am working, living, and enjoying life in Japanese.  I also learned about 3,000 kanji.  I`ve made many friends, had lots of great experiences, and enjoyed adjusting to life in Japan.  Now I do my best to teach my students and my readers how they can apply what I`ve learned so that they can learn the language of their choice better and with more enjoyment.