Ryunosuke Ota
EN 100-08
Ms. Clare Paniccia
My life with writing and reading
I believe writing and reading skills are very important skills in our life. Our
common communication tool is speaking. You can tell your opinion and your story directly
to your audience. However, words could not save in your hands and keep to future. That
why people created language and learned how to write and how to read.
I born in Japan and I learned Japanese before learned English. I already could speak
Japanese, when I was five years old. I remember my parents always talked me even I could
not understand. Then I could speak in Japanese even it was not professional. It was process
of learning language in Japan. When I was seven years old I got into elementary school, I
started to learn how to read and write in Japan. We have three different kinds of words. It
calls Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. We learned Kanji first, because it is the easiest word.
We bought Hiragana textbook and wrote Hiragana every school day. When I was eight
years old, I started to learn Katakana. Katakana is translated the other languages in
Japanese. For instance, we call pen same as American, but we cannot use Hiragana and
Kanji for the other languages words, because before WWⅠ we did not know any other
words. After WWⅡ, people created Katakana to translate the other country’s language that
we did not have in Japanese. Katakana is not hard to learn, that is why Hiragana and
Katakana was studied in 1st and 2nd grade. After we learned that Japanese language, we
started to learn Kanji that is from China. We have over billion types of Kanji that mean so
hard to memorize all and most of Japanese high school students know only half of it. I had
Ryunosuke Ota
EN 100-08
Ms. Clare Paniccia
learned Kanji until middle school. Learning Japanese was not hard, but hard to memorize
all types of Kanji.
For reading, I had studied until high school. When I was 1st to 4th grade, we read
maximum 30pages, because we studied few Kanji words and that was not enough skills to
read over 30pages. However, 5th grade to middle school, we read over 200pages and
contents became harder than elementary school reading. I wrote lots of essay about books
that I read and I hated it, but I can read most of books and news article now and I think it is
enough to survive in Japanese community.
For English I started when I was middle school. English was our requirement. We
studied how to write and read until high school. At first, we learned basic of English as
American elementally school students. When I started to learn English, I did not like it,
because I did not know why we have to learn the other language. I failed assignments and
tests. When I got into high school, my father told me how common language will important
for my future and I changed my mind and I decided to go to Montana State for 10 months
as exchange student. My host mother was elementally school teacher. That of the time, I
attended her class three times and she taught her students exactly same as I learned when I
was middle school. After I came back from America, I would like to learn more about
English and decided to go to college in America.
Ryunosuke Ota
EN 100-08
Ms. Clare Paniccia
Reading and writing English is hard for me, because I am from different country.
However we have lots of similarity. For instance we do brain storm same as American
students and we try to read the author’s opinion and emotion same as same as SEMO
students. Right now, I do not like reading and writing in English, but I want to consider
about it more and become a professional writer and reader.