日本語

I decided to study Japanese for a number of reasons. I have always had a fascination with Japanese culture - not one aspect in particular - but more of how modern Japanese culture is such an interesting combination of modern western culture and ancient traditional Japanese culture. After going to Tokyo to study at a Japanese language school this summer, I became even more fascinated with Japan and knew I really wanted to study Japanese in school. My plan is to eventually be a lawyer when I get out of school and I hope to be able to work in Japan.
In addition, I am also planning to do a concentration in linguistics at Columbia and one of the requirements for that concentration is two years of a non-Indo-European language. I think that Japanese is perfect for that requirement because it is essentially a language isolate - at least in the way that it is spoken, it is not related to any other world languages. I think that studying the differences between such a complex and isolated language and other world languages will be very interesting from a linguistics perspective.
I am very excited to start learning more and more vocabulary to be able to actually carry on a conversation in Japanese, and I am also very excited to start learning kanji because I think they are such an interesting and integral part of the Japanese language.
Japanese vocabulary in general is definitely very difficult because of the fact that aside from the words that are derived from English, words are just completely different from any sort of European language that I could relate to. However, I feel that as time goes on, the vocabulary will slowly start to form patterns and make sense in the same way that a language I am more familiar with does.