My paternal grandmother is Japanese, and I have always had a keen interest in foreign languages. These two factors combined to make me very interested in studying Japanese from a fairly early age. However, the thought of studying Japanese was always a distant possibility, as I never knew when I would have the opportunity actually to take classes. Japanese was not offered in the secondary schools I attended, so I gained proficiency in French instead (if you end up enjoying this blog, please remember to make me blog again when I end up spending a long period of time in France, which I very much hope will happen soon after I graduate from Yale). When I arrived at Yale in August 2007, I decided to take the plunge, now that I finally had the opportunity, and take Japanese. I have studied it for all four of my semesters at Yale.
This summer, I will be studying at the Stanford-run Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies (IUC) in Yokohama, Japan. I am leaving my home near Washington, DC, on 14th June, and I will return to the States on 11th August. The classes at IUC run from Monday 22nd June to Friday 31st July (six weeks). I purposely booked my flights so that I will have a week before my classes start to get settled in and a week and a half after they end to travel throughout Japan.
Before I close, I have two requests to make of you, my esteemed reader. First, a note on the title of this blog, which is currently "Gabriel Ellsworth の日本への旅" (make sure your browser's text encoding supports Japanese characters if some of that looks like gibberish). The title means "Gabriel Ellsworth's Trip to Japan" in, you guessed it, Japanese. I'll likely want to change it to something more creative, which is where you might play in: I will be taking suggestions. Second, I would also appreciate tips from you, especially if you have been to Japan before (but even if you have not), on places that I should plan to visit while I am there, as I am soon going to start developing my list of "must-visit" sites in earnest.
With that, I'll sign off for now. Welcome to my blog, and thank you for reading!
