Adventures in Kanji! Early last week, I gave a presentation at our Older Youth Workshop about my experience with kanji (the Chinese characters used in conjunction with the Japanese writing systems in everyday Japanese life). Everyone here has been really excited about it, and they have asked me to write articles for the newsletter and for the Transnational College of LEX reports about my examples. Compared to a Japanese person, my visualization of kanji is different and interesting to them. I decided that I would also include some of my examples here. One of the places i have focused on kanji the most has been the train. For about 2 hours everyday, I am stuck on a train with free time and signs with rom anji (the roman characters), hiragana (the Japanese syllables), and kanji. It gives a great opportunity to explore the new writing methods. One of the kanji I saw often was   駅. At first, it was very hard to distinguish, but I came up with a visual image to remember it. In...

One of my new challenges is overnight homestays with members of my Hippo Family. When I change host families in March or April, I will also be changing Hippo Families. So this is an opportunity for me to spend more time with them before I switch. I get a chance to learn more Japanese by interacting with more people and they get a chance to learn more about America. I have only completed two so far, but both of them were very different experiences. My first one was with a young couple who had 3-year-old and 1-year-old sons. We spent our time playing with toys, going to parks, and watching movies. One of the shows we watched, Shimajiro, was a program for young Japanese kids to learn English in a simple way like Sesame Street. I was surprised by how much the 3-year-old knew! He had never really shared English in any of our Hippo Clubs, but here he was reciting the colors, numbers, and vegetables when I quized him. He knew so many words in English, but couldn't really use them ...