I knew that I had a huge interest in foreign language and culture when I was a young girl. I wanted to read as much folklore and myths as I could find and also wanted to be able to pronounce all of the foreign names in the my favorite stories. Eventually my interests focused into a preference for East Asian folklore and themes through frequent trips to Japantown and Chinatown in San Francisco with my grandmother. In high school I had the great opportunity to take Japanese as an elective course, which I ended up taking for 2 years. Afterwards I continued my Japanese education in community college, taking as many culture courses, kanji tutorials and language courses as possible. Once I transferred to CSUMB I had been waiting for many years to finally be able to declare my major as Japanese. The culture courses and intermediate Japanese courses available at the upper division level were exactly what I had hungered for as a young girl reading Japanese mythology. I was being given the insight and tools to understand the concepts that pervaded the stories I had come to love in my childhood
AT CSUMB I had a learning/graduation plan to follow in order to ensure I fulfilled all the requirements of the university and my major program. For MLO1, JAPN 300 and JAPN 302 I was able to develop my grasp of reading, writing and listening in Japanese, later I was able to wrap this understanding together in JAPN 404 as I learned to write an academic paper and develop a research project in my target language in JAPN 403 and WLC 400. Fulfilling MLO2, a greater understanding of the Japanese culture itself was awarded to me through classes such as JAPN 310 in which I viewed films and applied cultural concepts discussed in class. Also, in JAPN 311 I explored ongoing societal issues affecting Japan's people, I was able to apply my own context to help me understand issues such as the pressures of job hunting and hikkikomori. I took SBS 348 which allowed me access to history of Mayan people whom I count as part of my ancestry, the experience of comparing Maya with my American culture as well as Japanese culture was really inspiring, so inspiring that I went on to create a project around comparing the religion of the Mayan people to Shintoism from Japan thus completing MLO 3. My capstone project has been a combination of my core language skills, cultural knowledge but also my research skills acquired through my experience in university. Through the years, in pursuit of fulfilling MLO 4 I have learned more and more about library research and academic writing through classes such as JAPN 403 and JAPN 404. For example, I have learned new ways to perform library database searches in order to limit my search results to what I need and then add them to a program called zotero which archives my research for me so I can make easy citations later. Last my immersion in the Japanese language while studying abroad met my goals for MLO 5, for 11 months I was able to develop my own personal understanding of Japanese and the Japanese culture from interacting with various business and people surrounding my university. Most of all I came to understand the feeling of belonging to a small community of Japanese students and the shopkeepers who support us by selling food and books day to day.
My goals initially after graduation are to complete as many of the preparations and requirements for application to grad school as I can. I am inspired to help people who do not speak english as their first language learn english and at the same time appreciate their bilingualism. I would like to achieve the JLPT N3 level of proficiency and apply for the JET program for an ALT position in the Fall of 2018. In the future I'd like to apply my skills to acquiring more language proficiencies beginning with Arabic. I speak English, Spanish and now Japanese; I would like to continue adding to this list for the rest of my life as I believe that language is one of the best ways to understand another culture.
AT CSUMB I had a learning/graduation plan to follow in order to ensure I fulfilled all the requirements of the university and my major program. For MLO1, JAPN 300 and JAPN 302 I was able to develop my grasp of reading, writing and listening in Japanese, later I was able to wrap this understanding together in JAPN 404 as I learned to write an academic paper and develop a research project in my target language in JAPN 403 and WLC 400. Fulfilling MLO2, a greater understanding of the Japanese culture itself was awarded to me through classes such as JAPN 310 in which I viewed films and applied cultural concepts discussed in class. Also, in JAPN 311 I explored ongoing societal issues affecting Japan's people, I was able to apply my own context to help me understand issues such as the pressures of job hunting and hikkikomori. I took SBS 348 which allowed me access to history of Mayan people whom I count as part of my ancestry, the experience of comparing Maya with my American culture as well as Japanese culture was really inspiring, so inspiring that I went on to create a project around comparing the religion of the Mayan people to Shintoism from Japan thus completing MLO 3. My capstone project has been a combination of my core language skills, cultural knowledge but also my research skills acquired through my experience in university. Through the years, in pursuit of fulfilling MLO 4 I have learned more and more about library research and academic writing through classes such as JAPN 403 and JAPN 404. For example, I have learned new ways to perform library database searches in order to limit my search results to what I need and then add them to a program called zotero which archives my research for me so I can make easy citations later. Last my immersion in the Japanese language while studying abroad met my goals for MLO 5, for 11 months I was able to develop my own personal understanding of Japanese and the Japanese culture from interacting with various business and people surrounding my university. Most of all I came to understand the feeling of belonging to a small community of Japanese students and the shopkeepers who support us by selling food and books day to day.
My goals initially after graduation are to complete as many of the preparations and requirements for application to grad school as I can. I am inspired to help people who do not speak english as their first language learn english and at the same time appreciate their bilingualism. I would like to achieve the JLPT N3 level of proficiency and apply for the JET program for an ALT position in the Fall of 2018. In the future I'd like to apply my skills to acquiring more language proficiencies beginning with Arabic. I speak English, Spanish and now Japanese; I would like to continue adding to this list for the rest of my life as I believe that language is one of the best ways to understand another culture.