Tokuni Daniel Henney ga daisuki desu.

I don't want the year to continue marching closer to its end without my learning anything new. So I've begun learning a new language. I could have chosen French or Spanish, since I had taken both languages as electives back when I was in college. But I'm a lazy bum when it comes to verb conjugation. Yo me siento, tu te sientas, el se sienta, nosotros nos sentamos, vosotros os sentais, Ustedes se sientan. You don't have to do these verbal gymnastics with Japanese; desu is desu whether it's me doing it, you, he, or they. Besides, I wanted to go Asian for a change. Everyone I know can claim some familiarity with Spanish and French, and some will even engage in spouting off whatever they managed to retain from their college classes. But nobody knows much Nihongo beyond arigato and sayonara. I suppose I'm attracted to the idea of knowing something the average joe probably doesn't.

A friend of mine who used to work for a Japanese company heard about my little language project, and asked if I would like her to ask around about proper classes. Whoa! Am having a cart-before-horse panicky feeling of being expected to see this through until I speak better Nihongo than the Emperor Akihito. Just let me get through all four audio cd's in my basic course, and then we'll see whether I have the proficiency for further study. Hold all the banzais and the kanpais; I'm only doing this for fun for now. As yet, I only have a vocabulary comparable with a Japanese three year-old, and I have only enough confidence to speak Nihongo to my car (it's Japanese, after all), but I would rather not rush things or it will never stick. Slowly but surely, that's the way to go. Dekimasu.