Since I’ve already posted a question I figured I should go ahead and do the intro.

My name is Jesse, but this account is being shared by my wife also (Kerri). We are living in Germany at the moment and are hoping to move soonish to Japan next. I’m a military contractor in IT and we’ve been doing this for a few years now, 3 years prior in Kuwait, 1 year here in Germany. We’ve been “learning” Japanese since prior to leaving the US, but never made much progress (thank you Rosetta Stone). We tried to learn some Arabic and German but were never as passionate about it. Now that we’ve made moving to Japan a priority, we are back to our first love and this time taking it seriously. Very excited to have found Textfugu as it seems like just the right approach for us. Combining this with RTK (eventually) will get us ready for what we hope will be a more immersive experience when we arrive (not taking the AJATT approach just yet). We are well acquainted with the challenges of actually integrating with a community/culture while working with the military, so we hope to be prepared for it this time and force ourselves to choose Japanese whenever possible.

I’ve moved around my whole life, never spending more than a few years in any one spot. Grew up in the Philippines (missionary kid), spent a couple of years in England (dad attending film school) and returned to the US for college. Afterwards I met Kerri and we got married and had a son. 7 years later (2007) we finally got out of the US and have no intention of returning. However, we are feeling the need to really commit to a place and stop floating around so much, so we are hoping that place will be Japan. We’ve always loved the culture from a distance and think it might be a good fit for us. We’d love to be involved in some new church plants that we’ve heard about and see if we can cast our long term lot in with the Japanese people wherever we end up. So I guess my ultimate “why” for learning Japanese is to be able to fluently explain the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ in the Japanese language and cultural context. Nearer term goals would be survival and ordering food (food is my passion list too btw…not just copying Koichi!).

Kerri may introduce herself later if she feels like it…