Cubing: Educative Narrative Topic

Describe it

My experience started out when I just turned 19 years old and moved to the other side of the world. I would be living in Okinawa, Japan and my world will shift completely. At the pinnacle of adult life this place will shape my future whether I liked it or not. Coming off the terminal I took my first steps in a different country. I was lost and felt isolated from everyone else.  Neon lights and buses lighted the roadways outside Narita International Airport. Luckily I was rag tagged with another group of Americans and we corralled through the unknown together. I would eventually take up residence just south the mainland (Honshu Region) to a tiny, lobster clawed shape island called Okinawa. Coral reefs and sandy beaches formed the jagged 70 or so mile coastline. Thrown into this place with no known prior Japanese language skills. My mind scared at the weird, wiggly calligraphy that etched itself on every horizontal surface in site.  This would be the catalyst that made me jump over the edge of uncertain down the path to teach myself a second language.

Apply it

Everywhere I went I needed to know Japanese from menus, road signs, to even advertisements. Never would I think I would miss reading random pointless ads. I enlisted my deeper thoughts and persuaded every ounce of my free time to try and learn this elusive beast. From online texts and self-help to even sinking so low into reading a Japanese: For Dummies book(It was a little helpful but only used it for a week) . Frustration and confusion will be my two new best friends as every night we would spend together reading and learning about it. Started with learning the two different alphabets and after months will lead into kanji learning and sentence structure.  After a year or so I moved up the elementary ladder of going to children’s books and TV shows and later start to cruise through some news channels and read thoughtful articles aided with only a dictionary as my atlas.

Associate it

At first it turned into a social need. I had to everybody else was speaking it and I was stuck with my very incompatible English. After half a year it turned into wanting though.  After a while the dread of going home after a 10 hour shift to not immediately relaxing seemed idiotic at first. Then I started to see how the simple things I learned would present themselves out in the world. From finally identifying one word to slowly forming sentences to shakily ask strangers directions. I started to see the reward. I then started to feel more confident and started to talk more. I even made friends with a lot of people that still talk to this day in America. Even after three years living there I was nowhere close to being fluent I wanted to master this new skill. When I moved back to the States I would continue to learn it every day and try my best to recreate all my stimuli from Japan and implement it to my American world.

Analyze it

One of the things that surprised me was the benefit it gave me in other areas. I never took something as serious as this was. I was an average student in high school with no real motivation to learn on my own time. An average worker that made sure my work started and stopped the moment my hours were clocked. This gave me new understanding of taking something and developing it. I became a self-starter and made sure that I applied the same discipline to other tasks I was doing even it didn’t relate to learning Japanese. I than started to love the idea of learning more and more and now I’m back in college and just thirsty to learn more subjects.