Lake Kawaguchi Trip Last week to celebrate the end of Dr. Flynn's visit to Japan, the Hippo office arranged a thank you trip to Lake Kawaguchi, which is right at the base of Mt. Fuji. Several of the Hippo staff attended, as well as some Hippo members from other parts of Japan like Osaka, and I was invited along with some of the other interns. Everyone had a chance to talk together and share experiences and impressions throughout the weekend and the area we visited was really beautiful. We stayed in a hotel with a great view of Mt. Fuji across the lake. We were lucky to arrive on a clear day so we could see the mountain, and trees were just starting to change colors for the fall. It was a really nice trip and it was nice to see a little bit of Japan outside the city-ness of Tokyo. View of Mt. Fuji and Lake Kawaguchi from the hotel The small tourist town that surrounds the lake At the hotel, I had the opportunity to experience a very Japanese tradition - the onsen, or...

Dr. Suzanne Flynn's Visit This week Dr. Suzanne Flynn is visiting LEX/Hippo in Japan so we have been busy in the office preparing for the various lectures and workshops that she has been involved in. Dr. Flynn is a professor of linguistics and language acquisition at MIT in Boston and also a member of the LEX America Board of Directors. Yesterday she gave a public lecture which was attended by many Hippo members on raising multilingual children (and becoming multilingual adults as well). The session also included a lecture by Dr. Sakai, a Japanese brain researcher on language and the brain, followed by a question and answer session. I was one of the MCs, along with 3 other interns, and introduced myself and facilitated parts of the session in English, Spanish and a little Japanese. One of the new things I learned was how to thank a speaker and solicit a round of applause from a Japanese audience: "Sakai sensei arigato gozaimashita, mo ichido hakushuo onegai shimasu....

Learning Like A Baby Learning Like a Baby I didn’t study Japanese before coming to Japan, except looking at a few books about the basic structure of the language out of curiosity, so the way that I’m learning is by listening, observing, and repeating. The Hippo philosophy is to acquire languages naturally through immersion. As Yo Sakakibara, the founder of Hippo writes, the Hippo experience is “one of adults experiencing what it is to be a baby,” and this is exactly what I’m doing. I had known this before coming to Japan but it’s really different to experience it first hand. Not only am I learning in the way that a child  learns, but I am acquiring language in the same pattern that a child does. The first words that a little kid learns are things like: mom, dad, hi, bye, hot, cold, happy, tired, you, me, want, like, go, eat, this, that, what, where. This is also pretty much the first set of vocabulary that I've acquired in Japanese, without even meaning to.  It ma...

A New Home In Japan I’ve now been in Japan a few weeks already and I’m getting settled into everything here. I live with my host mom, dad, and sister Azuki (her nickname in Hippo) in Wako-shi, in Saitama prefecture. My host dad is in the military so we live in an apartment complex near a military base. It’s a really nice area since it’s near a big park, there are lots of trees, and on a good day we can see Mt. Fuji from the balcony! View from our apartmen t Our pet, Cha-Cha Before I arrived in Japan, I saw on my host family’s application that they had a pet squirrel, which I thought was most likely a slight mistranslation for hamster, however when I arrived I was surprised to find that ‘squirrel’ was indeed a fairly accurate translation. He is actually a chipmunk and his name is Cha-Cha. My host mom explained that in Japanese the word for the color brown is Cha-iro, so Cha-Cha means something like Brownie.  Now I will always remember how to say brown in Japanes...

こんにちは！Konnichiwa! Hello! My host sister Asuka and I in 小えど, Japan Hi everyone!  My name is Stephanie, but in Japan I've already been given the nickname  Su-chan　 す－ちゃん    (su from Stephanie since the Japanese pronunciation is su-teh-fah-nee, and -chan is added to the end of a name when you are speaking to a younger person or a friend), so you can call me Su-chan! I am one of the five Hippo interns working in the LEX headquarters office in Tokyo this year. In addition to me, from Wisconsin, the intern team is made up of Tino from Mexico, Sakun and Ken Ken from China, and Hiu-chan from Korea. It's great to have such an international group!    Before coming to Japan I attended the University of Wisconsin and graduated with a degree in fine art. During that time I also worked for Wisconsin 4-H International Programs, which is how I first learned about Hippo through the 4-H/Hippo summer and yearlong exchanges. Last summer I had the opportun...