Hello everyone!
My name is Brian James. I'm 36 years old, living in Pennsylvania - near Philadelphia. Today, I finally became a member of JapanesPod101. After many months of listening to the podcast on my way to and from work (1 hour drive each way), I decided I needed to get the PDFs, the Grammar Bank, everything Peter talks about.
I can tell you, that just after browsing around in my new account, I am VERY IMPRESSED. Everything is here that I need to really understand what I'm learning in the podcasts. I will be spending my lunch hour at work on JapanesePod101 from now on!
To the JapanesePod101 team (and you know who you are):
I want to say THANK YOU. When I was in middle school, I was in "Special Ed" (It's for people who they think have learning disabilities, when really it's for people who learn DIFFERENTLY) and because of that, I wasn't given an option of taking a language class. I wanted to learn a language, and wasn't allowed to! Can you imagine? When, I reached high school, I was no longer in Special Ed classes, and wanted to take a language... the problem now was, you had to had the language classes I didn't get back in middle school as a pre-requisite.
Having been into Anime in the early days (Science Ninja Gatchaman, Mach Speed Go-Go-Go, Astro Boy, 8th Man, Gigantor, Ultraman, Godzilla, Gamera ... and the like) I had no idea that all these awesome cartoons and shows were originally from Japan! One day I was at a friend's house, and we were watching Godzilla (the 1956 American version with Raymond Burr) and I noticed the female lead role's mouth wasn't making the same motions as the audio I was hearing (I later I noticed this in the kung-fu movies too), and I asked my friend why that was.
"Because she only speaks Japanese..." he answered.
After that, I was determined to learn more about Japanese, and anything I could about Japan.
So, here I am many years after my schooling, and I'm studying Japanese! I get a lot of odd looks from people when I tell them I'm studying Japanese. They'd say:
"Why Japanese?!? Why not French, or Spanish, or German?"
My answer:
"Why NOT Japanese?"
That usually shuts them up. Then I give them a sentence I've learned:
"Nihon rgyori wa monosugoku oishii desu yo!"
Now that, usually gets an "oh my god" look from anyone.
All this to say Thanks to everyone there at JapanesePod101.com for allowing a life-long dream of learning a language possible. Especially the one that holds my interest as much as Japanese does.
If anyone out there is in the Philadelphia/New Jersey/New York City areas who would like to chat and later on meet up for Nihongo chatting, discussion about movies, music, going clubbing (dance music is a MUST!) please contact me on my website at:
http://www.briankjames.com
Ja ne!
Sincerely,
Brian K. James
www.briankjames.com
