Narrative Essay About Japanese Language

I am an American who happens to have studied Japanese for 6 years, and is nearly fluent in it. I am quite a minority in America, as the amount of people who study Japanese is quite small. As I studied more and more Japanese, I became very interested in the peculiarities, or strangeness in language. Especially when comparing Japanese and English, which are two languages that might as well have developed on separate planets. One of the first things that foreigners learn in Japanese is the use of the word “です” and “だ”. We are taught how to use these, but we are not given a translation of them. Rather, we call these words “the copula”. “copula” is a word than English speakers, for the most part, don’t really understand. The first time I came to Japan, I asked a Japanese business college what the word “です” and “だ” mean. She responded with various explanations about the usage and politeness of the word, but never could explain the meaning of the word. I would ask again and again, “but what does “です” mean”. After a lot of deliberation and arguing, we concluded that the word has no meaning, and that it was untranslatable into English. It was

UChicago isn’t a place where people just study. Its a place where people innovate, create, and do insane things. For better or worse, UChicago kids are weird. There are few typical people at UChicago. There are few “normal” people at Uchicago. Hence, there are very few boring people at UChicago. Everyone has something unique and creative to bring to the table. The level of uniqueness that exists at the University of Chicago is incredible. We invented Nuclear Power. We invented the theory of supply side economics. We invented carbon dating. We discovered REM sleep. The way that UChicago has changed the world are endless, and I wanted to be part of that