Farewell

I no longer have myself attached to you for I have moved on. Though my heart has been broken time and time again, I will always manage to mend myself and spread my wings to once again fly away. My fate is engraved in stone, and it says that I will live to find someone who will provide me the solace, affection and understanding I've always yearned and deserved. I thought I couldn't live without you but the fact that I stand on my own two feet at this very moment proves that I am fine without you. The dream is over. Now, I smile.

Essay

This is just a really short essay I wrote for Cool Japan class. The essay should be about the reason you think that Japan is cool. It's really crude and is written very informally, but I think that it sufficiently expresses my reason. Just look at the amount of informal expressions I used. The third paragraph is left hanging and I didn't quite develop a real conclusion too. Was too lazy to write more because the essay should just be about one page, which I had already surpassed. Anyway, I just wanted to share my thoughts about why I like Japan.

Japanese

In my personal opinion, the most interesting aspect of Japan, I must say, is the Japanese language. I have always been fascinated by the ethereal sophistication the Japanese language possesses, as I consider it to be steep in subtle intricacies. The study of language is something I would like to make my living out of, naturally because I major in language teaching, specifically ELT. By far, Japanese is the only language I have studied, or rather, am studying, that is in opposite to the English language. Personally speaking, I think that English is a highly extravagant language due to its sheer size, whereas Japanese, though quite flamboyant itself, is somewhat like a morsel of creamy matcha mousse that melts in your mouth with a subtle, pleasant aftertaste.

Nowadays, many yearn to learn the Japanese language. This is immensely an influence of watching Japanese anime. I really liked watching anime because the artistic style is uniquely different from animation from other parts of the world. I personally call animation from other countries “cartoons”, but animation from Japan is exclusively called “anime”. Anime is world-renowned and is enjoyed by peoples, young and old, all over the globe. I, myself, admit that anime was the reason why I wanted to learn Japanese in the first place. Thanks to anime, I garnered enough intrinsic motivation to start learning the language, which was neither an easy task nor a truly difficult one, to say the least.

Initially, learning Japanese was a superficial endeavour of which, I thought, was to merely be able to comprehend Japanese anime easier without reading the subtitles; however, as I continued learning Japanese, I suddenly realised that there was more to the language than just anime. I started becoming fascinated by the system of the language itself and the underlying principles that bound individual constituents of the language, i.e. the syntax. Being a linguist in the making, I was intrigued by the linguistic features of the language. With this, I also was exposed to the semantics and pragmatics of the language, which gave me a vague schemata of the culture of Japanese society. Before I realised it, I fell in love with the Japanese language, Japanese culture; I fell in love with Japan. After years of self-study, I have come to the realisation that the more I study, the harder it gets, especially because of the 3 different writing systems Japanese possesses, which are namely Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Without doubt, Kanji would be the most difficult of all to learn. Therefore, until this day, I am still on the journey to finally master the Japanese language, even though I may still be a rookie in terms of correctly writing and fluently speaking in Japanese.

In conclusion, what I think is coolest in Japan is the language. It entwines all aspects that are essentially Japanese, be it society, anime, culture, lifestyle, you name it. The Japanese language is at the core of all things Japanese, and that is why I think Cool Japan is Cool Japanese.

Present

Remember the present I said I wanted to give you? I still keep it with me here. I never thought I could ever give it to you and I was right all along. No matter how much I hoped, that dream would never ever ever ever come true. For now, I'll just keep these feelings to myself.

I'm loving Japan.

Wish

Hidup yang Kau beri tidakku sesali. Kini satu ku idamkan, hanya mati. Duhai yang kuasa sambutlah ku yang ingin pulang kepadaMu. Dendangilah ku dengan mautMu.