About
This site is a blog to document my endeavours in learning Japanese based on the method put forward by Khatzumoto on his website, All Japanese All The Time. Conveniently, I made following this method my new years’ project for 2009, so it is particularly easy to track my progress! More information about the approach I’m taking is in this introductory blog post.
Here seems like a good place to explain who I am and where I’m coming from. I am a videogames programmer currently living in Brighton and Hove, UK. My professional website at http://www.dpwright.com/ gives more detail on my activities in that regard. Like many in my profession, I have long held an interest in Japan: its culture, its language, and of course its influence in the sphere of videogames. I’ve toyed with the idea of learning Japanese for a long time, and even picked up the odd phrase here and there, but never really taken the plunge. Problems like, “I don’t know the Kanji,” and, “I’d rather play guitar than memorise a list of different occupations” kept getting in the way. Just before Christmas, I took a few private classes, which were fun – but I could tell it was going to be a long time before I could actually say anything worth saying.
Enter AJATT. A friend and colleague of mine, Chris McLaughlin, had been following the site for a while and began working through Heisig in around November. He’s far ahead of me in terms of Japanese, though, having studied it at University and lived there for a year, so I was skeptical as to how well it would apply to a novice starting study from scratch.
It was only over the Christmas holidays that I actually got around to reading the site, however. And Khatzumoto, its author, has a very… persuasive style of writing. Before too long I was enthused and excited by the prospect, and I resolved that New Year to give it a go.
Day One began on January 1st. This website is largely a personal log, so that I can look back on it in a few months and see how I’m going – but it might be of interest to others reading Khatzumoto’s website and wondering about the process. His site is very good, and much more detailed than mine is likely to be about the method, but it is written after the initial 18 months of his gaining fluency. Mine will no doubt be more haphazard, and less valuable from a purely informational standpoint, but may give an idea as to how it feels day-by-day to be studying Japanese in this way.