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　As a graduate student who majors in Korean language and culture, I found out long ago that it is almost impossible to carry out reasearch on the field without looking into the areas of intersection bewteen Korean and Japanese history and culture. It had been quite a while since I resolved to learn Japanese, but I had been putting it off because my former attempts to learn other Asian languages- Chinese and Vietnamese- were never very successful and those experiences planted fear in my mind. This semester, however, there were few courses in Japanese cinema and photography studies that I really wanted to take but couldn't because of my lack of Japanese proficiency, so I finally decided to enroll in this Japanese course. With virtually no prior no knowledge of Japanese it's been not easy - I still find some Hiragana characters really confusing -, but thanks to our wonderful Sensei and kind and helpful classmates I could make it this far, and I am now fully determined not to quit until I'll be able to read Japanese novels in Japanese!