Hi jw, your blog is always a pleasure for me to read. Since I'm also trying to learn the language and laters make a longer trip to Japan, this post is especially interesting to me. I wish you and your wife all the best on your ongoing journey at Japan. P.S.: You have a really cute daughter :)

I wondering what do you do for a living in Japan? What kinds of jobs would be available to a non-Japannese speaker?

Good sincere post! Living in Japan is can be difficult. I am about to move there for the fifth time. With about 4 years in country under my belt, I wouldn't say it's getting any easier, but I am starting to understand the culture alot more. It's a hard country to crack. That's why most folks can't do it. After a year or two they give up. To truly appreciate it over there you will have to come back to your own country for a about two years after living there for two or three. I think Japan, for most foreign residents is a love hate relationship. LAnguage is the key though!!! I am still fighting this issue myself, but I made a conscience decision to learn and I will not give up if takes my whole life. Good luck!

Hi jw- Nice site and very cute kid! I am sure that it is very frustrating not to be able to communicate in Japanese well. But don't lose heart, and please remember that language learning is not a race. Although two years of serious, full time study probably would have already made you relatively communicative (as opposed to six months or less for Spanish), who says that you have to learn at the same pace as those students? It is perfectly okay to chip away at it. It'll just take longer. (I did it in Japan over a period of 6 1/2 years- starting at the age of 30.) Also, although you do not enjoy some of the advantages of the full time language student, at least you have a connection to the place through your family. Language issues apart, having children in a country which you did not grow up in allows you to take part in the society in ways that people without children never get to see. Wait till your daughter begins school! Good luck!

i think you're doing a good job, also i suggest that you start learning conversational japanese other than writing kanji and hiragana. you can start by learning how to count and especially how do you feel or what you feel in japanese or to be exact learn how to describe the "five sensory details"... goodluck!

i think you're doing a good job, also i suggest that you start learning conversational japanese other than writing kanji and hiragana. you can start by learning how to count and especially how do you feel or what you feel in japanese or to be exact learn how to describe the "five sensory details"... goodluck!

I agree with Ariel. It might be easier to learn Japanese if you forget about the writing system for now. Speaking is more important than writing.

Thanks to all for the encouagement and suggestions. Just FYI, I still haven't finished bringing this story up to date. I think in this post I left off at the beginning of 2003. My Japanese (and outlook on life here) have improved quite a bit since then. I'll catch up tothe prsent soon, but I have a couple of other posts that I'll need to make first.

Hey. Congratulations on this site, it?s great. Me and my girlfriend dream of going to Japan for a couple of years, she wants to study japanese architecture, and I?m about to become a lawer over here (Argentina) so I don?t really know what would I do around there. I Gues it must be hard to fit in. When I was a kid, I went to live to Switzerland, and I didn?t speak a word in German. I had to learn it at school, in first grade, trying to guess what the hell were the other kids saying all the time. Anyway, just wanted to say that the site is great, and the postos that describe japanese?s culture are awesome (that one about the Jikka, "Home" and "True", Incredible!). Well, good luck.