On Me

Hi all! My name is Seiji Furukawa (say-gee, like gee-whiz) and I’m a Japanese Linguistics major transfer student. I’m originally from the Chicago suburbs, but I ended up in Spokane Washington during high school and spent 3 years at Washington State University studying Economics and Finance. I’m half-Japanese (my dad’s Japanese), but only conversationally fluent.

I spent my summer helping run and plan a 3-week ESL summer camp for Japanese Junior High and High School students from Okinawa Japan. It was my third year working the camp and probably the last, but it was a lot of fun.

This is my first quarter here at University of Oregon and I really don’t know much of anything about the area. I went to the Japanese Student Organization’s first meeting on Thursday to meet new people, but also really because I needed to ask where the best Asian Market was.

I have a lot of hobbies, but I spend most of my time on two of them:

Cooking (Traditional Japanese Kelp Stock Soup)

Italian-Style Pasta:

Recording Music

My main interest in East Asia stems from my father being Japanese. Since I was born and raised in the United States, I don’t have the familiarity I wish I did with Japanese culture and history. I’m also interested on an academic level, discovering what shaped East Asian cultures and how these factors can have obvious but surprisingly non-linear impacts. Career-wise, I’d like to go to grad school for second language acquisition or Japanese Linguistics because I’m interested in specifically studying the efficacy of current English teaching methods in Japan, as I’ve observed some very broad teaching method and curricula issues in that area.

On the Class

The number of loan words across Japanese, Korean, Chinese is fascinating. I understood to a degree – due to the presence of Kanji in Japanese – that Japanese and Chinese had significant contact, but I didn’t realize just how much language contact had dictated the formation of new words across these languages. I think the course structure builds upon itself well, with lecture and the readings being very well connected. The class doesn’t really challenge how prepare so much as being in a new school does. As a transfer student, being at a new and different University really revitalized my learning efforts and helped me correct some less functional learning strategies I’d fallen into. Certainly, having a class structured as well as this helps enact those changes though.