The one thing that I now regret not doing before moving to Japan was learning Japanese.
My parents never pushed us to learn Japanese, in fact, Japanese was never spoken until my Grandparents moved back to the United States when they were older.
It seems that after WW2, most Japanese Americans tried to assimilate into America, with that English was our language.
But moving here, I quickly realized I should have pushed myself to learn.
In some of my travels here and trying to learn more about Japanese Culture, I came across cities that offered foreigners Japanese Lessons, sometimes for free to enable foreigners the opportunity to learn Japanese.
Knowing this, I got online and checked the City website, and sure enough they had classes–not for free but for a very reasonable cost.
I quickly signed up and, coming towards the end of session 1, can kind of read Hiragana, the very basic written Japanese, which is not easy now that I’m older.
We are going on break and will start session 2 in a couple of months.
Looking forward to learning more.