Hi Hashi!

Thank you for the welcome. I was first interested in Japan and China when I was a kid and I would read books about them, the writing characters fascinated me. Another was Jackie Chan great adventures cartoon series and Pokemon cemented my interest as a kid and now that I’m an adult I discovered sushi so I keep circling but never land. Now that I’m homeschooling I want to teach my son a language and then spend sometime in language immersion. Just saw your post on WWOOF and that is what I plan to do with my son. Maybe not THIS particular venue since he is a child after all but something similar.

Right now he was demanding sushi (but he is allergic to fish) so I made him a cucumber roll instead. Figured I would reel him in with food to spark interest, move on to some cartoons and then the formal stuff. Funny thing I found Tofugu last night while I was researching “best time to buy rosetta stone” lol. I bought a heavily discounted Arabic and Spanish language homeschool editions from Rosetta stone and was planning my lesson plans as I wait for the shipment to arrive.

I was researching when I should try again for the Rosetta stone Japanese version and start saving up for it. I wont be buying it but since Japanese is a desire of mine I decided that I would take textfugu for a spin.

In 2009 I tried learning Japanese using MITs open classes but it was too hard http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/foreign-languages-and-literatures/)

So I’m using my children as reasons to learn languages and that way I can justify the expense as well as making my commitment that much stronger. After all its for the kids.