Japanese Practice

Despite being in the middle of nowhere in Lubbock Texas, I do make an active effort to keep practicing Japanese and stay sharp. One of the things that I do is write a blog in Japanese once a week.

In Japan, MIXI is the most popular social networking site. I think one of the reasons it is so popular is because it limits its members to those who have a Japanese cell phone. This way a lot of foreigners are automatically filtered out and it can be kept a closed community. Anyway, one of the biggest parts of MIXI is the blog feature. Every week I write about something random (everything from college life to food). Sometimes I get messages from random Japanese people.


I wish I was in Japan so that I could actually talk to these people in person, however conversing online is the best I can do for now.

I also like to do letter exchanges (snail mail) with my old Japanese friends. I alternate writing letters to them in English and Japanese. I think that writing these letters is much more effective than typing emails on a computer. Writing out all the kanji and taking time to think of the grammatical structures is very beneficial to my Japanese.


West Texas isn't the type of place that attracts the most Japanese, however I was fortunate enough to meet a Japanese student that is studying English. Her fiance lives in Lubbock so she decided to move here with him. I think that her English abilities are on par with my Japanese abilities so it is a good matching.