Hello there, I’m Sister Kyoya. Over two years ago I began taking a Japanese class at the local community college and loved it despite a 15 credit load (trust me, its a LOT.) I was really excited to take the class because at the time it looked like my husband would be able to take the course with me. As it turned out, that half of the plan fell through. I really didn’t want to be in the class by myself (I’m a horribly shy person) but I wanted to learn Japanese badly enough that I went through it anyway. My husband and I figured that he could learn along with me and help me study every night as well.

Even before getting through katakana, it was obvious that I was already leagues past him because I had to study a lot more intensely than he did. It was very hard feeling like I was leaving him in the dust when it was something we wanted to do together. I was pretty much cramming every moment I was awake when I wasn’t studying for my other two courses. My commute to and from school was filled with Japanese vocab on my MP3 player, reviewing flashcards with my husband the days he went with me, reviewing the hirigana and katakana images I stored on my MP3 player, working on practicing my handwriting on breaks between classes, the first quarter I somehow managed to make a bento everyday (I still can’t figure out how I managed it.) I was studying until my brain was more than overflowing. I was doing everything I could just to keep up but by the end of the first quarter I was feeling lost.

My professor Mikiko sensei is a very lovely woman, born and raised in Japan and came to the States at some later point in her life. She is an utterly delightful woman to talk to, but she is a very intense professor. Learning Japanese by what felt like a force-fed method with rarely any explanation other than “You just learn it” was very difficult on most of her students. Her course should have been 10 credits for the amount of information we were expected to learn, especially the second quarter. She would tell us something new one day and expect that we would forever have it memorized by the next day. For simple things like the kana I could understand, even simple vocab, but when we started getting into verb conjugation is when I really began to loose it. I was only half understanding how basic sentence structure went and then suddenly having all the verb forms tossed at us in a week. My facade of keeping it together virtually crumbled overnight. Did I also mention I’m dyslexic?

Halfway through the second quarter I had to write an email to Mikiko sensei letting her know that I couldn’t keep up despite all my best efforts. (Realistically it would take me another 8 hours after class to do everything she required of us everyday, and that didn’t include my other courses. I was on the verge of a breakdown.) I told her that I’d finish the quarter and I’d still try my best, but the pace was just more than I could handle with my dyslexia. It was a very hard thing to admit after I had earned a straight A out of her class the first quarter, and barely managed a C+ from the second quarter.

I am a person who hates to give up, but everything was turning out all wrong. It was a year later that I could finally pick up my textbook again without going into a full-on panic attack. In the year that has followed I have still wanted desperately for my husband and I to learn Japanese because it is continues to be something we would use everyday if we knew it. I tried to be teacher and student all at once by reviewing the Japanese I did know and attempted to make Anki flashcards for my husband to use as well, but there was still so much that confused me and simply didn’t make sense.

At the end of the month is out 15th wedding anniversary. We have talked a lot over the last few years about wanting to live in Japan at some point, but without the language, it just seemed like a fool’s task. So instead of going out to eat some fancy meal for our anniversary we decided to get two lifetime memberships to Textfugu instead. We are looking forward to finally (re)learning Japanese together, having the time to learn it properly, and enjoying it.

~Sister Kyoya