Inquiry Introduciton

Once upon a time I spoke Spanish fluently.  That is, I did until I moved to Japan and jumbled it up with Japanese. Now I speak both well enough that I sound fluent to English speakers, but not well enough that I don’t raise more than a few eyebrows and elicit a fair bit of patient correction from native speakers. 

I could focus my attention on regaining the Spanish that was lost, but my brain is still stuck hacking new neural pathways in Japanese. It’s kinda on a roll.  Besides, it’s way too much work to convince it to jump over and re-blaze those overgrown trails in Spanish. So Japanese it is.

Not going to lie though, it was a lot easier to watch my language skills level up on their own when I was actually living in Japan. Immersion is exhausting, but it works wonders. Now that I am bereft of that giant learning crutch, I must  forge my own path to Japanese fluency. Hence this blog.

My plan is to create a YouTube channel entirely in Japanese. Hopefully this will provide the push I need to  both study some grammar and writing skills (my kanji reading and writing level is horrific),  and practice sustained communication in Japanese about a variety of topics.

I came up with the idea after talking to a Japanese friend of mine who was debating  between living in Victoria and Vancouver. YouTube had very little to offer her in the way of in-depth anything about Victoria, and there was little to no advice provided by Canadians, in Japanese, for navigating Canadian customs, culture,  and daily life in general. Therefore… *insert cheesy drum roll*… Imma do it! Or at least I’ll try to anyway.

There is a lot of work that needs to go into the process of creating a YouTube channel. I am planning to use this blog to collect resources and share my progress as I research the kinds of language Japanese YouTubers use, the filming and editing techniques I’ll need, the places I’ll visit, and the kinds of topics Japanese people would be interested in, etc. If I can, I would also like to include a few interviews with some Japanese friends of mine along with the results of my filming, editing, and subtitling practice. At the bottom of each post I am thinking of including some notes/ reflections on any new Japanese grammar and vocabulary I’m learning.

Whelp, here’s to hoping this is a success!