Just so you know

I’m Matt Henry, I’m a senior at Northwest Nazarene University studying Mass Communications and History.

Hi.

I’ve started this blog because from July 2nd to December 23rd, I’ll be in Tokyo, Japan doing a study abroad program. I’m going to KCP International, which is a school located in Shinjuku. I’m going to be studying Japanese for two semesters. After that, I’ll return to NNU for my last semester.

I just want to get a lot of the basic information out of the way in this post so I don’t have to keep making parenthetical statements for all the people who may have stumbled on this blog without knowing me personally. While this blog was commissioned, so to speak, by my parents, I hope that other people who are interested in studying abroad in Japan and/or KCP can find this blog useful.

Why Japanese?
I get this question a lot, and I don’t like it because I don’t really know the answer. Most people assume that I must be way into anime and manga, but I’m really not. I am a big fan of anything made by Studio Ghibli, but I generally don’t enjoy anime or manga. People also assume that I must be a huge video game nerd. While this was definitely true when I was younger, my interest in video games has severely waned in recent years. I mostly just play Civilization games and anything made by Bethesda, both of which have nothing to do with Japan.

It really started around the year 2000, when I was twelve. Going into junior high, I decided that I wanted to learn something by the time I graduated college to justify all those years of existence. By the age of twelve, most kids are just getting to the point where they can consistently tie their shoes correctly, so seeing people who were really good at a certain instrument, had learned a language, were great at sports, or even just had some random skill that obviously took a lot of time to develop was very impressive to me. Too a twelve year-old with no knowledge of string theory, learning Japanese seemed like the mindbogglingly difficult thing to set my mind on. At the time, I was near my peak of video game infatuation, so it was definitely a factor that pushed me towards Japanese rather than, say, Arabic. I also had so much Pokémon merchandise that I made the news (yes, really). Japan certainly knows how to appeal to twelve year-olds.

How did that go for you?
When I tell some people that I’m studying Japanese, I often hear, “Oh, I studied that in high school! Kaw-neechee-wah!” Hearing that makes me so mad, because I never had the option to take Japanese in high school, and my university is even worse. As a result, I have never taken an actual Japanese course taught by an actual Japanese teacher. Instead, I became very familiar with the foreign language section of Barnes and Noble and took full advantage of whatever internet resources I could find. I basically tried every technique there is, and started from scratch about four different times during the first three years. There are a lot of dumb language programs out there. By about 2004, I had learned more about the process of teaching myself (and how not to teach myself) a language than I had about the language itself.

During high school (2002-2006), I took the most appealing of the three language options offered, German. I had a great teacher and I followed through with it for all four years. I did pretty well in the class, but kept Japanese in the back of my mind and applied many of the teaching techniques I saw in my German class to Japanese. I missed out on the chance to go to Germany during my senior year but I did become the first person in our school to attempt the German AP test. I didn’t pass, but oh well!

In college, I was pretty overwhelmed with other things, so language study was relegated to the background slightly. I kept things going with several great internet resources that I found: YesJapan, JapanesePod101, and a weird, old TV show from the early 90s. I was still not very good, and I began to get depressed by the fact that I had begun this quest about six years ago and my language ability didn’t do justice to how much I had worked on it.

December 2007 was the turning point. I had decided by myself that I was going to take Japanese seriously and set up some long term goals, including at least one study abroad semester before I graduated. Around that same time, my cousins Chad and Yoon Kyeong introduced me to one of their friends, Yang, who grew up in Japan. I started meeting with her once a week and practiced conversation. From that point, things took off. I separated the language learning process into speaking, listening, writing, and reading, and made sure I was getting practice in all four. I found a source of Japanese TV shows that I could watch, and developed an interest in certain Japanese bands just so I got some constant, real world exposure. As of this writing, I would consider myself a “lower intermediate” and have learned 650 Kanji.

Don’t you have a life?
It probably sounds as if all I do is sit at home with a Japanese book, but Japanese is actually a pretty small section of my interests. As I mentioned, I’m a Mass Communications and History major. I’ve been doing video shooting and editing as long or longer than I’ve been studying Japanese, and it’s the one thing that I would have such an ego as to consider myself “very good” at. I’ve been a teacher’s assistant for our department since my Sophomore year and I helped to teach the class on After Effects. I’m currently preparing for my senior project which I will shoot next Spring.

I tossed in a History major mainly to take advantage of a very good professor that our school happened to have. Through loopholes, I hadn’t taken a history class all throughout high school. I enjoyed the one required history class from college so much that I decided to try for the major. There is one strange degree requirement where I need eight credits of a foreign language for my History major, so that’s where I can argue that my study abroad program is necessary rather than just something I really want to do.

I also dabble in photography and graphic design. In my spare time, I watch Lynda.com tutorials on computer programs. See? I have a life.

Oh, did you mean social life? Yeah, I don’t have one of those.

What is this program?
I’ll probably be able to answer this question a lot better in the coming weeks, but I have done my fair share of research on the KCP program that I’m attending. Basically, all they do is teach Japanese. Most of the students are from surrounding Asian countries (with Koreans being the vast majority), but there are a few American students as well. One of the American affiliate schools is The University of Idaho, so I’m technically a U of I student for the duration of the program.

There are six language levels in the program, and one takes a placement test to get filtered into these levels. I’m aiming for level four, with the understanding that it’s incredibly difficult to do so. Mr. Tanaka, the American on-site program director, cautions that “it is not so uncommon for those who took Japanese classes for several years at their home institute to be placed in KCP level 1 or 2.” I nevertheless got the list of curriculum from Mr. Tanaka for levels 1-3 and have been studying them all this summer to make sure I know all the material. I won’t cry too hard if I get placed in level 3, but level 2 or lower would be a major blow.

I applied for a homestay, but I was told that very few Japanese homes applied this semester because of the swine flu. Despite there being exactly zero casualties from swine flu thus far in Japan, it is apparently a huge deal over there. So I’ll be in a dorm, which is fine by me. It means more hanging out with Americans and more freedom, but less provided food. I would still like to try the homestay, so I applied again for next semester. Who knows.

That’s all the background information that I can think of to add to this post. I’m sitting in the Boise airport now and am preparing to take off. I’ll arrive in Tokyo around 11:30 pm MST (2:30 pm Tokyo time). I probably won’t update the blog the moment I get back, but I will before I go to sleep.