With my final French oral exam this Saturday and my dissertation due tomorrow, my penultimate university course is so nearly over! Hooray! This means I’ll be free from study until next February. Good times.

From now until then, I’m heading to Novi Sad for the Polyglot Conference (see you there?), moving into our new flat (so close now!), and hosting our first Christmas (ho ho ho!). So I’ll be pretty busy. Time for a break, right? Don’t be silly!

You see, a month or so ago I entered a competition over on Kerstin’s blog, Fluent Language, and…I won! Woah! Exciting times! I won a 6 month subscription to a Rosetta Stone package of my choice. I chose Japanese.

Why Japanese?

I had no real interest in learning Japanese until I started sixth form. My secondary school was pretty average and offered French, Spanish and German. In fact, we were the first year to be offered Spanish at GCSE – lucky! When I looked around for sixth forms and colleges, I didn’t know what job I wanted to do or if I wanted to go to university afterwards. All I knew was that I wanted to do Spanish. This left me with only two options – the college in the next town involving a rather early and long bus ride each day, and a local sixth form school that just happened to be a specialist language college. Where do you think I went?

And you know the coolest thing about the place? They taught Japanese! This was, and is, really unusual for somewhere around here. Unfortunately, there was no option to study it for me at A level so it was still a pipe dream.

In 2010, I left my job in a flour mill laboratory (as you do) to work in a school as a Learning Support Assistant. As it happens, it was my secondary school. Weird, I know, but these things happen. I’m glad they did because it was working here I met Ashley. When I started working there, I had plans to leave the following summer to travel in Asia, not to fall in love. But hey, sometimes plans change. For the better. My plans to travel in Asia still happened though, and with Ashley’s influence, we decided to go to Japan for a week amidst the journey.
Wow. Just wow. We spent a week in Tokyo and I think it’s fair to say we both fell head over heels for the place. We ate sushi.We sang karaoke.We shopped in Harajuku.It was awesome.

We’ve always wanted to live and work abroad someday and I think it’s fair to say, Japan became a viable option from how much we loved it on our trip. Not only is Japan a potential home in the future if we’re super lucky, but the culture is also really intriguing. And as for the language? Well, it’s just so different to every other language I’ve learnt and I’m totally ready for the challenge of something so new and different!

What’s the plan?

I have the Rosetta Stone package to play with thanks to the lovely Kerstin (I’ll be giving an honest review when I’m done by the way!), I also have a few books, various materials from the Language Show last year, a couple of audio courses, and a few apps. One thing I’m really conscious of is showing how inexpensive it can be to learn a language. I’ll be keeping tabs on how much I’m spending on my Japanese learning and putting a post together about this in the near future.I even have the cutest book ever in the form of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that I bought in Japan from Book Off! for 100 Yen! So adorable!

I was considering doing the italki October Language Challenge (SO tempting!) but I was really doubtful about having enough time. But I was feeling guilty. As if I was passing off a ready meal as my home cooking. As if I said I’d exercise every day and I missed three days in a row – consciously. As if I wasn’t learning Japanese to my full potential. The opportunity to massively improve from the start was there and I wasn’t going to take it?

So, yesterday I signed myself up for the Challenge (for the third time this year!!), I got out my diary, and I scheduled 12 lessons with a Japanese tutor. I was crossing my fingers that the tutor would accept because it was really hard to find someone to teach with the time difference between here and Japan. So much so that I’m going to be getting up really early for the month of October and having most of my lessons at 5.30am! Eek!

What else?…I got myself three new notebooks the other day to use for my Japanese. I’m still undecided about how to use each one at the moment. All I know is that I want to learn to read and write (and text – almost a new skill nowadays!) in Japanese. I’ll fill you in when I’ve decided how I’m going to use the books!

I’ve also thought up a monthly plan to keep me on track before my final (!) university course comes along and surprises me with the workload in February. I want to have a solid knowledge before then. Here’s my little plan so far.

October

November

• Learn at least another 100 Kanji.
• Read a short article in Japanese each day.
• Have at least 1 italki lesson per week.
• Make a one month progress video.

December

• Learn another 100 Kanji.
• Have one italki lesson per week.
• Give a tour of the flat in Japanese.
• Make a video about Christmas in Japanese.

January

• Learn another 100 Kanji.
• Have one italki lesson per week.
• Make a video about my New Year’s Resolutions in Japanese.

Of course, January is blooming ages away so this little plan is definitely subject to change! Whatever happens I’m going to enjoy it. You can be sure of that!

What language are you learning at the moment? Have you learnt Japanese before? Do you have any tips for me? Please do let me know in the comments! Arrigato!