A letter from Feb 19, 2023

Dear FutureMe, do not forget to update your Linguistic Biography and I hope you have already learned japanese. My name is Kenny Ramirez, I am twenty one years old. I was born in Hidalgo and I am Mexican so my first language is Spanish. I also speak fluent english. My parents told me that I started to babble when I was between four to six months old, they really do not remember but my dad says that babies babble since they are born. My dad said that I said my first word when I was one year old and that the first thing that I said was ¨mamᨠthey also told me that at a year and six months I was already forming basic and simple phrases according to the age I was. Throughout my life I have been exposed to many different languages, I grew up speaking both English and Spanish. When I was three, my parents took my sister and me to live in Santa Ana, California but when I was eight we returned back to Mexico. But I think that I can not speak either English or Spanish properly. I think it has to do with the fact that I really did not use Spanish, so I did not know how to read in this language and because of this my first months in my new school in Hidalgo were kind of difficult but thanks to my mom I could learn how to read fast. With english I have a similar problem, since I grew up speaking it I never really learned grammatical rules and because I lived in Hidalgo my teachers never helped me study the language, they thought that because I already spoke the language I did not need to study, I would always get nines or tens in any exam so I was always the best in my class and my classmates would ask me for help, than I moved to Tecate, Baja California and in my first day of college I really felt lost, I could understand my teachers and classmates but everybody knew english and I was not special anymore so I had to study a lot, nowadays, while I am writing this, I am in fourth semester of my career and I think that my english has improved a lot but I there is still so much that I need to learn. The third language that I had been involved with was japanese. When I was little, probably in elementary school I used to watch animes like Sailor Moon, Remy, Heidi, Knights of Zodiac, Ranma ½ and Dragon Ball so you could say that I was kind of a geek than in middle school I had the access to internet and in the old youtube, there was thousands of anime series and movies for free and most of them were in their original language which was japanese and so I started to copy what they would say in the chapters I would see. So I started to google up the alphabet of this language, its culture and some vocabulary that I wanted to learn. Nowadays I have learned that what I used to do was a learning method called shadowing and I really still use it, my dream since I was little was to. I was bullied for liking anime and was considered a weird kid so I stopped learning japanese. Then I got to high school and in the third semester I had the opportunity to learn another language. I studied German for at least 1 year in person and my last year of high school was online so I lost everything I learned of this language. I can still speak some basic words and sentences. Because of Covid 19 my parents lost their jobs so my aunties convinced my dad to move to Villas del Campo, that is a small residential area between Tecate and Tihuana, where I am currently living now. When I got to BC I saw that my spanish from Hidalgo was different from the spanish people spoke, and the thing is that in BC there is a lot of different dialects because a there are a lot of different people from different states so I had to learn words like ¨curado¨ and having to call a pen ¨boligrafo¨ instead of ¨lapicero¨ as I used to call it in Hidalgo and so many more. And again, in my third semester I studied French in college. I was not really excited about learning that language because I wanted to return to Japanese but I had a wonderful teacher that made me love her class and learned a lot from her. I think that I would like to relearn French someday. When I was studying French, I also started to study japanese again and in my fourth semester I decided to return to japanese, I have been in love with japanese culture for an eternity and now that I have the support of some really incredibles friends that I have, I could accumulate all my courage, since I learned the basics in third semester now I took a course and I am really happy in it, because I am learning so much more about the language, I really want to do a scholarship to Japan someday.