Hello, my name is Matthew Lanigan, and I am a 21-year old sophomore at Ohio University, studying Linguistics. I have been teaching myself Japanese for the past 2 or 3 years (I don’t know exactly how long), and now that I have transferred to Ohio University, I have begun seriously studying the language a bit more formally. I plan to study abroad in Japan for 11 months beginning this September, at Chubu University in Nagoya, Japan. In the mean time, however, I have decided that in order to improve my Japanese, quite a bit of practice is necessary. For this purpose, I have begun this diary, which, other than this information page, will be written solely in Japanese.

Due to the nature of this website, please feel free to correct any grammatical or other errors that I make in my posts in a comment. In fact, this is strongly encouraged, and will be greatly appreciated. If you do suggest a correction, however, if you could give me a short explanation for the reason behind it, I would greatly appreciate it. It is specifically for this purpose that comments are left open.

Thank you for any help that you can give. I hope that you are interested and perhaps inspired by this diary.