Nippon 2008 - 2009

Heute war das hier in meinem Postkasten:

Moin moin,

was machen Grammatik und Kanji?
Hablo perfekto japanski? Arigato? Nomen gasai?

Hat Radio Tokyo dir schon eine Stelle angeboten? Ich will prinzipiell auch
mal in den nächsten 1-2 Jahren nach Japan. Am besten eine Rundreise…
Du kannst ja mal Bescheid sagen, wenn du auch ne Reise planst oder dorthin
übersiedelst. Dann komm ich vorbei und tausche deutsche Currywurst gegen
Sake.

Ich habe noch keine gute Idee für eine passende Antwort…

So, habe alle gewünschten Dokumente fotokopiert, ausgefüllt, unterschrieben und eingereicht. Ok, um bei der Wahrheit zu bleiben, ich musste heute nochmal zu Frau Fujita ins Büro, weil ich vergessen hatte ein Dokument komplett auszufüllen. Und hoffentlich hat sie meinen Essay nicht gelesen, der sieht nämlich in der eingereichten Version wie folgt aus:

What do I want to achieve at the Bunkyō University?

Hello, my name is Daniel Gollub and I am a 27 year old student at the Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. At Bunkyō University I would like to meet a lot of different people and improve my Japanese conversation skills. I hope I can become good enough to make lot’s of new friends and participate in all the interesting activities at Bunkyō University. I also hope to greatly improve my reading and writing skills, so I become able to read newspapers and interesting magazines. That’s also important for my little research project I want to do. I want to analyse the news reports of the demonstrations on the upcoming G8 summit in summer 2008 on Hokkaidō.

But I think the everyday conversation skills will be the most import skill to improve in the beginning. Why you ask? Before I answer that particular question you need to know that German parents are nearly the same as their Japanese counterparts – at least as far as I can tell from reading about it. The thing is because of my age my mother always bothers me to find a steady girlfriend and get married, so hopefully I will meet my dream girl at Bunkyō University. And therefore I really need good conversation skills because I lack good looks. But to marry a Japanese woman I also need to be able to read and write more kanji, so I can fill out the marriage applications and all the other officially needed documents. My Japanese teacher in Germany told me once to marry a rich Japanese woman, because then I wouldn’t need to work any more. Of course that was a joke, but the idea doesn’t sound bad to me¹. ☺

So after I have hopefully found my future wife at the Bunkyō University I will still need to get a job after my graduation because I don’t like being unemployed. But I come not unprepared! Before I started to study Japanese I learned to be a software programmer at a small software company, so I think it would be the great to work as a software engineer at a Japanese software or hardware company after I graduate. And I read that Bunkyō University has a faculty of Information and Communication, so maybe if my language skills have improved enough during the first 6 month of my one year stay I might be able to attend a course there, too.

Beside improving my overall language skills at Bunkyō University there are several other goals I want to achieve during my stay in Japan. First of all I want to learn first hand as much as possible about Japanese society and culture. I know there are a lot of interesting places and historic sights in the Kantō region on Honshū and I want to see as many of them as possible. But culture and society aren’t all about tourist attractions, so my second goal is to taste all the local Japanese food and drinks, too. This might be the most delicious exchange in my whole life and I am really looking forward to it.

ダニエル・ゴルプ

¹ Please don’t take this paragraph too serious. Of course my only goal is and will be to improve my language skills and not to find a girlfriend. This whole paragraph was just to impress and flatter the female readers. Have a nice day.☺

So, jetzt muss ich nur noch die 750 Kanji aus den ersten vier Semestern wiederholen und neu lernen, weil ich 700 davon komplett vergessen und verdrängt habe. Und zur Vorbereitung sollte ich vielleicht auch das eine oder andere neue Kanji lernen…

Ich muss für die Bunkyo auch noch einen Essay schreiben, den die da in irgendeiner tollen Werbebroschüre veröffentlichen wollen oder so. Ich hab null Plan und keinen Bock und das ist dabei rausgekommen:

What do I want to achieve at the Bunkyō University?

At Bunkyō University I would like to meet a lot of different people and improve my Japanese conversation skills. I hope I can become good enough to make lot’s of new friends and participate in all the interesting activities at Bunkyō University. I also hope to greatly improve my reading and writing skills, so I become able to read newspapers and interesting magazines. That’s also important for my little research project I want to do. I want to analyse the news reports of the demonstrations on the upcoming G8 summit in summer 2008 on Hokkaidō.

But I think the everyday conversation skills will be the most import skill to improve in the beginning. Why you ask? Before I answer that particular question you need to know that German parents are nearly the same as their Japanese counterparts – at least as far as I can tell from reading about it. The thing is because of my age my mother always bothers me to find a steady girlfriend and get married, so hopefully I will meet my dream girl at Bunkyō University. And therefore I really need good conversation skills because I lack good looks. But to marry a Japanese woman I also need to be able to read and write more kanji, so I can fill out the marriage applications and all the other officially needed documents. My Japanese teacher in Germany told me once to marry a rich Japanese woman, because then I wouldn’t need to work any more. Of course that was a joke, but the idea doesn’t sound bad to me¹.
So after I have hopefully found my future wife at the Bunkyō University I will still need to get a job after my graduation because I don’t like being unemployed. But I come not unprepared! Before I started to study Japanese I learned to be a software programmer at a small software company, so I think it would be the great to work as a software engineer at a Japanese software or hardware company after I graduate. And I read that Bunkyō University has a faculty of Information and Communication, so maybe when my language skills have improved enough during the first 6 month of my one year stay I might be able to attend a course there, too.

Beside improving my overall language skills at Bunkyō University there are several other goals I want to achieve during my stay in Japan. First of all I want to learn first hand as much as possible about Japanese society and culture. I know there are a lot of interesting places and historic sights in the Kantō region on Honshū and I want to see as many of them as possible. But culture and society aren’t all about tourist attractions, so my second goal is to taste all the local Japanese food and drinks, too. This might be the most delicious exchange in my whole life and I am really looking forward to it.

So long, 乾杯! ダニ蔵 (aka ダニエル・ゴルプ)

¹ Please don’t take this paragraph too serious. Of course my primary goal is and will always be to improve my language skills and not to find a girlfriend. This whole paragraph was just to impress and flatter the female readers.