Thank you for the warm welcome and wishes for good luck! I’ll need it.
When I started learning Japanese in the early nineties, it was a very practical language to learn, especially for business. Now the big one is Chinese, and Japanese is not as useful, although it’s still a marketable skill. My main problem is that despite being relatively talented at learning languages, I never felt comfortable speaking in Japanese since there is such a focus on writing, mostly since it takes forever to learn enough kanji to even read a newspaper if you don’t start when you’re a kid.
I loved writing and translating Japanese rather than speaking it, so I only reinforced that bias, but by my senior year in college I was really hurting when it came to speaking the language. I understood spoken Japanese well enough, but I didn’t have enough practice speaking it to feel comfortable–unless I had a few drinks first. I’m apparently fluent when I’m drunk. Unfortunately, coming to class intoxicated wasn’t really an option, and I didn’t figure out that bit until the beginning of my senior year, anyway.
Spanish or French, on the other hand, would have been very useful for me personally when I was going to culinary school and working as a pastry cook. And Spanish would still be useful to me since my husband and his whole family are fluent. (I have this fear that when we have kids, they’ll learn it too and they’ll all be able to keep me out of the loop!) French would have been helpful when I was in college studying post-colonial literature. Many of my favorite writers write in Spanish, and it would be nice to be able to read them in the original. So, for me, a Romance language would have been more practical because of my interests. I was never likely to go into business, and I have no burning need to go to Japan. I ruled out studying abroad there because I’ve never been a fan of most Japanese food and I was afraid I’d eat nothing but white rice the whole time. (My palate has since become a bit more refined!) I just liked being good at Kanji and having nice summer jobs working with exchange students.
The instruction I received in Japanese was a lot of rules, especially at first. A lot of rules and a lot of memorization of vocabulary and hiragana/katakana/kanji. When I got up to 3rd year college Japanese, we started doing a lot more translations and composition, and they tried to get us to speak more.
I was an English major, so I’m actually quite enjoying learning all of the rules in Wheelock. I’m like that way with cooking too…I want to know why I’m doing something, not just how to do it. I’m hoping to improve my writing in English by studying Latin as a nice side effect, so I’m more than happy to be bombarded with rules.
As for my novel, I’m writing a young adult fantasy novel. I’ve got about 250 pages written, but unfortunately there’s a lot more story to go, so I’ll eventually have to cut some of what I have to make it a desirable length. As far as what it’s about…well, without giving away the plot too much, the fun part is that a lot of scenes take place in cemeteries, so I’ve recently become a cemetery enthusiast, both for research and first-hand observation. They’re just fascinating in general. I get very excited when people tell me that a chapter is really creepy. I never thought of myself as a “creepy” writer, but here I am writing about cemeteries, and I wrote a horror short story this spring. Though, personally, I think it’s a bit creepier that I took my mother to a cemetery on mother’s day, but in my defense she was the one who suggested it.