I started learning Japanese in Junior high. My best friend (who was also a CIR) was taking it. I thought it was interesting, so I jumped in too.
My first day of class, the teacher came in speaking nothing but Japanese. I thought it sounded so amazing. She gave us a chart of hiragana, we sang an alphabet song together to get a feeling for what the kana were. I was totally infatuated.
I immediately started bothering the teacher looking for ways to have exposure to Japanese. This teacher was also the dean of the Japanese Concordia Language Villages in Northern Minnesota called Mori-no-ike. I suggested to my friend that we go, and for the next two summers we went to Japanese camp together.
Junior high led to high school, and my best friend and I parted ways going to different schools. His high school had Japanese. Mine didn't have Japanese, but it did have Chinese, so I thought I'd take that since it was, to my 14 year old logic, 'close'. After two years, I realized that it was just a substitute for my interest in Japanese. I started taking Japanese as a high school student at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. Japanese there was really really hard and so different from the fun days at Mori-no-Ike, but I learned a lot during that time.
Going to college I decided that I liked Japanese enough to major in it. I chose to study abroad at Waseda, but in both college and Waseda, I changed cirriculum so many different times between each system that I ended up repeating a lot of material. It was incredibly frustrating and way too easy. Going back to college after study abroad, I was put in a class that was kind of over my ability level, and for the first time ever I was really struggling in Japanese.
Before becoming a CIR, I was determined to get my Japanese as good as I could expect from myself. I bit the bullet, became an English teacher at a small school in southern Gunma. I had a very limited class schedule with lots of out of office personal time, which left me tons of time to study. One of my advanced students volunteered to be my tutor twice a week, and also many teachers at the school were studying Japanese, so we created a study group. We bought the grammar books for the JLPT, bought the Joyo kanji dictionaries, etc, and we, about 5 of us, studied our hearts out. With my volunteer teacher, I was reading newspapers for the first time with her help, twice a week. More importantly, on my own, I was studying 15 kanji a day to prepare for the 2 kyuu and then the 1 kyuu tests. I missed the 2 kyuu test by 10 points.
Luckily JET dubbed me good enought to be a CIR by that point. But with joining JET and joining the great JET community and being chucked to Miyazaki prefecture all the way from Gunma, I lost my study group and my volunteer Japanese teacher. With only 4 months until the 1 kyuu test, I was studying 50 vocabulary words a day from the list I had printed from online. I did practice listening CD's two weeks before the test everyday, and I felt as ready as I could before we drove up to Fukuoka.
I missed 1 kyuu by quite a bit. It was really hard.
I took my chances and said no to recontracting wanting to come back to Tokyo.
10 years later, after that first infatuation in junior high, language camp at mori-no-ike, Chinese in high school then back to Japanese, frustations in college, intensive personal study, and signing that nerve-racking 'no' on my recontracting form with no JLPT certification, committing myself to joblessness in a few months...I am working as a PR translator at Mitsubishi Electric HQ near Tokyo station.
There's been a lot of ups and certainly a lot of downs, but it's been a fun journey. It feels good to see something come from a simple childhood interest become my career.
TNW
holds your hand and shows you exactly how verbs change according to tense, politeness of register etc. Take the verb to eat, taberu. It, and more than 300 other verbs, each have an entire page devoted to showing all their conjugations, eg