By Lucca Bey

I’m Lucca, I’m a 16 year old, black, trans dude, who, until last year, only knew two languages, Chinese and English. I had discovered Japanese Plus through my school, and I vibed with it immediately.

In the beginning, I truly didn’t have an idea to which extent the Japanese Plus program was going to have an impact on me. Though this is primarily a Japanese language learning program, the language and culture are intrinsically connected, and thus, we ended up learning a great deal of both. Japanese Plus really opened my eyes to how foreign, yet closely connected we are globally. Even though they’re completely different places, the similarities with Chinese culture, Japanese culture, and American culture were a huge surprise to me, and the differences and new concepts we learned about drew me in.

It felt a bit like an immersion experience as we got to experience first-hand Japanese culture inside of our own city. Through the enriching events that we attended to the guest speakers in our class, it really widened my perspective and taught me that Japanese cultural experiences are so much more than just Kimonos and Sushi.

A lot of the speakers we had in the program even exposed me to how valued a global education and vantage point are in both college and career settings. Seeing all these great people talk about how excited they were at the opportunity to have us study abroad in Japan, and how many colleges are more than happy to have students who spoke and understood another language, gave me this revelation.

In short, this program helped me diversify my mindset, and taught me the value of a global education. I am more grateful for this experience than I can put into words.

By Lucca Bey

As the school year’s close is fast approaching, so does a period of reflection. With our final presentation for our Japanese I class closing in, it’s crazy to look back on how much progress we’ve made as a class so far. We learned over 90 different Japanese characters, excluding Kanji, learned over 120 different vocabulary words, and too many cultural aspects than I can count.

While we still are in the beginning of our Japanese journey, it’s important to look back on how far we’ve come in just a year. Whenever you study a language you begin to recognize it in places in your everyday life more than you thought could actually be possible. It truly gives you an entirely different perspective on little tidbits on the world around you. The connections that can be made from the basics of Japanese that we already know is amazing.

For example, just the other day I was browsing twitter and saw a post with Japanese. Now while no one in our class is completely fluent (yet), I wanted to give it a go. I didn’t go into the post expecting to understand any of it, yet surprisingly enough, I did! Well, kind of.

One doesn’t become fluent in a day, but the post had so many of some of the basics we learned in class, and some words I picked up along the way. Before I start droning on, as I tend to do, I’ll cut to the chase. The post was about a girl who was studying art, and how she had progressed from her first year to her third year. While I can’t say “progress” in Japanese, I do know the words “study,” “art,” general number counters, and how to say “year,” so all I needed to do was some light guess work to fill in the blanks!

It was a pleasant surprise that really made me reflect on how much we’ve managed to learn in such a short period of time, and I’m excited to show that off during our Capstone project on the 29th!