Carlie’s Journey: The In Between Years

This is Part Two of my Japanese Language Journey. If you missed it, read Part One first.

Japanese sort of faded from my life for a few years. I had friends who liked some anime so I was exposed to Evangelion Neon Genesis, Akira and a few other things along those lines. It wasn’t until sometime around 2005 that I began to get really interested in Japan and Japanese again. Mainly through manga, in translation. Some of my favourites were:

  • Fruits Basket
  • Hana Yori Dango
  • Zettai Kareshi – and anything by Yuu Watase

I’ll add more as I think of them!

I watched some anime as well at this time but was largly unimpressed – mainly because I watched anime based on the manga and well, the book is always better than the movie!

I read hundreds of manga and somehow it rekindled or maybe I should say it started the fire in me in learning Japanese. So my earliest goal was to want to read manga in its original form.

After making a concious decision to learn Japanese, I researched what people at my university did when beginning a Japanese course. I bought Genki and Tuttle’s Guide to the Kanji, and began my efforts to learn Japanese.

2006 was a blur of moving to Brisbane, new jobs, and new university. I didn’t have much Japanese progress and I do not remember much of a focus on it. However, I was still reading manga and I was a regular at a particular manga related forum. Through the forum I began to hear about Japanese TV shows. In particular I believe Densha Otoko was the first drama I watched. Soon after I watched Gokusen and Kimi wa Pet.

I was excited about dramas and learning Japanese again. I searched around the internet but was disappointed that I could not find very many blogs that reviewed dramas. I decided to make my own. GoddessCarlie has been my online alias since my first domain back in 2000 – the name of that domain sounds like a porn site and can see now why my mum was a bit worried.

This all rekindled my passion for learning Japanese. I debated if I was going to study Japanese at university. The nature of the major meant I would have to spread out my study over two years, compared to others where I could possibly fit it all in a year. In the end, however, I decided that was what I wanted to do.

I also decided in my eight years of blogging to take it to the next level. I joined Blog Mastermind which gave me some useful ideas in running my website.

From 2007 onwards a new journey in language learning began.


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