Don't be jelly people! If you study hard, it could be you next time
(Seriously, like half of our class got scholarships and went to Japan this year)
Anna: I'm mostly just doing Japanese, really. I have three general classes and then kanji (chinese character) and reading class. I also signed up for Japanese Law and Society, Japanese Way of thinking classes, which are given in English though. And I'm also taking Pottery class, where some supposedly famous Japanese artist will teach us the style of pottery his family has done for 11 generations
There are also some extracurricular activities, I'm taking calligraphy.
As for Japanese itself, the most difficult part is obviously the writing system. But when you get to a certain level (after about 2 years of studying), you get used to it I think... Writing it is not as difficult as remembering how to write it
There are 2000 commonly used Chinese characters in this language, and the Japanese study them starting from elementary school all the way up to high school - so foreigners have it more difficult, because they get less practice. (But truth to be told, even Japanese often forget how to write some characters - because everyone just types on a PC nowadays.)
I can read/understand the meaning of about 1000 characters, but if I were to write them without any aid, I could do maybe only about 500 or so.
The other difficult aspect is various levels of honorific speech. Talking with friends is easy, it omits a lot of verbs and auxiliary verbs, but when talking to someone socially above you, you should use specific verb forms (there are even special verbs), which are usually really long and hard to remember.
But at least the grammar is fairly easy!
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i got angry so i made a penis