About

Gasp!

What’s that, dear reader? Y-you want to know more about me, you say?

*cracks fingers*

Well, I’d be happy to indulge you.

The quick facts

  • I’m a high school student with a bit too much time on her hands
  • I self-study Japanese, Korean, and hopefully several other languages in the future
  • I’m a finalist for the NSLI-Y 2018 Korean summer program, and I plan on documenting my experiences on this blog
  • The purpose of this blog still isn’t quite clear to even myself, but my hope is that it might be useful to prospective NSLI-Y applicants and other language learners. That being said, I do want to also post about a variety of other topics that aren’t necessarily pertinent to the goals I’ve mentioned.

A brief history

As a young weeaboo, I fell in love with the popular anime Naruto. I binge-watched episodes so quickly that I sometimes finished multiple seasons in a day. When I had finished all the available English-dubbed episodes, I started on the subtitled ones and began studying Japanese about a year or so later. 

I had absolutely no clue how to begin teaching myself Japanese and was ready to explode with questions.

  • What should I study?
  • How should I study?
  • How do I avoid drowning in kanji?
  • How do I know that I’m not just spouting gibberish?
  • How can I make my Japanese sound more natural than a textbook?
  • Does everything cost money?

About three years and a considerable amount of research later, I’ve found answers to these questions and thought I’d share my compiled thoughts with others who struggle with them too. Here, you’ll find what’s worked for me thus far and how I plan to progress with my studies going forward.

Oh, and more recently, I’ve started studying Korean. You can expect a lot of my posts to be about that too.

Finally, I received a scholarship to study in South Korea for six weeks this summer with the government funded program NSLI-Y. In hopes of spreading passion for studying abroad and helping applicants who scour the internet for information about the program like I once did, I will be writing all about my travels.

Thank you for visiting, and I hope to see you again soon!