Hey there! My name is Alex Aguilar-Rudametkin, a Character Animation major from California Institute of the Arts. For the longest time I’ve been wanting to study Japanese since I was in my early teens. When I was asked why, I simply would say because I want to be able to play or make Japanese games!

I would take feeble attempts at learning Japanese since then, buying a Kanji book and repeatedly litter pages of the same Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji symbols feverishly. It didn’t really stick over time. There weren’t any Japanese classes offered in my high school so I would search for resources online at the time, and found KoichiBen’s Youtube channel, which prompted me to Tofugu. I thought it was hysterical, I learned little gems about the cultures and vague history of Japan through Ben.

Then I discovered “Let’s Learn Japanese – Yan-San and the Japanese people” on Youtube and watched a handful of episodes but I lost interest because I would have to backtrack often to catch a multitude of information thrown at me at once, like learning new nouns, verbs, conjugations, sentence structure and listening to it with their skits. It was great for some time, but it wasn’t substantial.

I gave up.

Over the course of my life I’ve seemingly have been more and more surrounded by Japanese culture. I have a lot of friends who speak Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Kantonese, Vietnamese, etc. and each one has piqued my interest enough to learn them in due time.

My goals have shifted over the years. Not only do I want to design games or animate, but I want to use Japanese as a bridge to connect with other artists, listen to Japanese comedies, hear commentaries going on over Street Fighter III: Third Strike matches on Youtube, understand the development of large and small games, and most importantly find Japanese resources and understand Japanese philosophies to help me grow as an artist.

I want to develop my artistic skill through meditative Kanji. I want to shock my friends when they make clandestine whisperings by contributing. I want to end my female friend’s scheming for fun. I want to catch up with the electric announcers of Japanese games of all forms. I want to eventually visit Japan.

I want to have fun! Japanese will make that much easier on me through hard work and discipline!