Well, I guess it's an introduction.

Welcome to the Jakaze blog.

First of all, as you can see from my name at the profile, I'm not a native-English speaker; in fact, I'm an Vietnamese.

In my view, being a person which doesn't speak English as his mother language actually has some advantages. My parents forced me to learn English when I began studying elementary school (English is a compulsory subject at Vietnamese junior high school and many people study it much earlier). So, by the time I go to university, it can be said that I've already mastered 2 languages. Now, it's the time to begin learning the third one.

In the past couple of months, I spent a lot of my time in surfing language learning websites. As both Vietnamese and English use alphabets, I want to learn a new language which uses a different chart of characters. That is the reason I put aside French, Spanish and German to focus on Japanese and Chinese. Finally, I chose the language of Japan because of the long history and rich tradition of this country. Another reason for this decision is probably because I'm an "manga otaku" (a person who addicts Japanese comic books) and I have more chance to use Japanese than other languages.

So, I set up this Jakaze to post what I have learnt in Japanese and some relative subjects. My goal is not make this blog become a Japanese tutorial because I know there are a lot of good websites teaching Japanese on the net and they are written by native Japanese people (I am a total beginner in Japanese with about 2 weeks experience). Instead of that, this blog is more like my learning journal. The order of posts is based on the order of my learning. So, sometimes, you can see I learn a kanji character then I go to learn a grammar structure and then I came back to the previous kanji character because I forgot it. I think this situation is common especially with Japanese beginners like me.

And the last thing I want to talk about is the name "Jakaze" of this blog. Obviously, name like "learningjapanese" or "japanese4beginners" is easier to remember but firstly, these beautiful name are already taken and secondly, I want a name which is customized and have something of me. So, "Ja" in this name is the aka of Japanese and "kaze" in Japanese means "wind" which is also the meaning of my firstname "Phong" in Vietnamese. Additionally, its length is the same as the length of words "Yahoo!" and "Google" which is my favourite brandnames.