Hello! My name is Taylor Branford, and all my life I’ve absolutely loved Japanese culture, and everything related to it. I’m a communications major in college and will have my BA in a couple years. My ideal job is to go into voice acting (always told I would be great at it, and I’ve practiced it since early high school, I’m 24 now). I figured that if I learned Japanese, I would not only be able to communicate with more people but I’d have fun with it (and possibly even do voices for character in anime shows, but we’ll see). The only thing that ever held me back for so many years was that it was hard, and I didn’t know where to start. I wanted to find something effective and simple for me to pick up on, and I think Textfugu is the gold mine of just that.

What (or who) led me here? There’s a guy name Victor who I discovered recently on Youtube (his Youtube is gimmeaflakeman), and he mentioned Textfugu if you’re ever interested in learning Japanese. I was, so I came here. I started to look around for a bit, and then really started to dive in and discipline myself to learn Japanese, so I started going through Hiragana (no more excuses, time to do it!). To my excitement, I was so surprised at how simple and effective Textfugu’s methods were for me. I absorbed so much information and studied so hard, that I picked up Hiragana in under a couple days, and can read, write, and speak it already very well (of course, I don’t know what anything means, or how to structure anything, but maybe we’ll get there soon). I think a lot of that was dedication and simplicity (I’m not sure what the norm is,but for me, this works). I was so impressed that just today I signed up for the perma-membership, because if future lessons are anything like season 1, I definitely want to stick around.

I’m posting here with the goal of others hearing my story and making friends. I live in Santa Barbara and attend city college, and there are tons of native Japanese speakers as transfer students here (I’m assuming) so it’s easy to be social. The problem is that I’m shy when it I want to make friends with someone. I have acquaintances and a small group of friends, but I’m trying to be more social and expand that group if I can.

Anyway, thank you for taking the time to read my introduction, and I hope anyone reading this who isn’t yet a member can feel empowered by my experience with Textfugu, and have that passed onto them and maybe invest in Textfugu if they wish one day. Many thanks go to Victor (gimmeaflakeman) for the recommendation (thanks man!)!