My name is Bryant Wang.
I'm a student at University of California, Berkeley.
I'm double majoring in Linguistics and Japanese.
I love learning and teaching languages.
I'm currently also learning American Sign Language (ASL) and would love to meet with people who know it, but it seems italki.com doesn't have that listed under languages. ):
It seems italki only allows you to choose up to 4 languages you speak and up to 4 that you are learning...
Here is a more complete language history of myself:
I was born in California, and grew up speaking Mandarin Chinese at home and English at school. I was first introduced to other languages in the library. I borrowed a Sing-a-long Spanish kid's book, and I think I never returned it (lost it, paid for it, but found it later again). I didn't learn much Spanish though.
I became exposed to Japanese animation and comics in middle school, and studied on my own since then. It wasn't until high school, though, that I took my first official language class. I chose German (others were Spanish, French and Chinese) and it was a wonderful experience! My passion for learn languages exploded after this first year, and I tried to explore and learn about other languages as much as I could. I would sit in the foreign language section in bookstores for hours just pouring through language after language. I don't recall how many languages I've played around with during this time, but I eventually decided that I wanted to learn French seriously, and I took classes at my local community college one summer, and enrolled simultaneously in German 4 and French 3 in my final year of high school. After graduating but before moving to University, I decided to take a second semester Spanish course course at the community college.
I continued this Eurocentric language obssession in my first year of university by taking a year of Finnish (my favorite class that year!), but soon decided that learning Asian languages might be more beneficial to me, particularly because of family and friends, most who spoke Asian languages (and UC Berkeley is more than 50% Asian, or at least it feels like it). In my second year of uni, I decided to finally take a real course in Japanese, and I've continued that until last semester when I got to 4th year level Japanese. I enjoyed it so much, that I decided to add a Japanese major. I also took a year of intro Korean in my second year.
Now I'm in my third year of university, and I'm taking Chinese for heritage speakers to strengthen my Chinese, cause it's pretty sad that my Japanese level courses were higher than my Chinese. This spring, although not taking any more Japanese, I've added American Sign Language (ASL) to my repertoire. I wish I had started earlier! It's too bad that Berkeley doesn't offer an ASL program.
Next year will be my fourth (and perhaps last, or not, I'm trying to get a 5th year) year. I may end up not taking any language courses, since I've decided that I want to work on an Honors Thesis for my Linguistics major, and I won't have the time, especially when I still have a couple courses for my Japanese major to complete. (I *will* be learning Classical Japanese for the major, though! and I suppose that can count as a language.) Even without an official class, I'm sure I'll be studying more languages from books, tapes, videos, and hopefully I can meet people to chat with. If I get my extra 5th year, I plan to use it for study abroad. Where, I don't know yet, though I was thinking of Iceland, Sweden, or the UK (I know they still speak English, but I'd love to learn other dialects as well). After graduation, I want to join the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme (JET) in which I will teach English in Japan for a year or more. Whenever I'm done with that, I plan to go to graduate school in Linguistics.
