Hi! My name is Shannon and I currently live in Wisconsin. When I was (much) younger, though, I spent 3.5 years in Okinawa （おきなわ) as a Navy brat in Makiminato (まきみなと, who says hiragana isn’t fun?). That exposure to Japan and Japanese culture has never left me – I’ve been reading (translated) manga for over 20 years, and started buying my anime back in the days when you had to choose subbed or dubbed (always subbed, of course) and a two-episode Urusei Yatsura (うる星やつら, I can almost read that, yay!) tape would run $35 and had to be special-ordered from the comic shop.

These days my Japanese exposure is almost solely through anime and the web; however, I recently got to vicariously visit Tokyo through the Facebook posts of several friends. After whining about it for weeks (I’m nothing if not honest), my wife surprised me by saying we could spend two weeks in Japan for our 20th anniversary in 2018 (I know, she’s great, isn’t she?). I still get to pay for it, but hey! I can live with that.

That said, I’m determined to learn enough Japanese by then to get by on the trip with minimal English (except when talking to my wife, because she’s decided I’ll be her interpreter). The language has always fascinated me (I’ve known how to count to six in Japanese since I was, well, six, among a few other nuggets I picked up living in base housing and listening to Styx in the ’80s) but the process of learning it was a daunting, looming, apparently-impossible task.

In the past few weeks, though, I’ve tested out several self-learning sites and methods, with some really startling (for me) results! After two weeks of using various tools I’m to the point where I can recognize and (slowly) sound out hiragana, and now I’m super-excited to move on to the next phase. Out of all the sites I’ve tried, TextFugu seems to best-organized, and I love Koichi’s sense of humor. So, I’m now a perma-member, and am totally looking forward to getting my Japanese on.

Thank you all for reading (this post started out so short!), and I look forward to meeting many fellow students! よろしくおねがいします!