Instead of restricting her academic limits to the basic scheduled classes, freshman varsity tennis player Kristen Rosenthal stretches her mind to master the language of Japanese. The ongoing project enables Rosenthal to embrace her culture and communicate with her relatives.
For the past four years, Rosenthal’s mother, Michiko, who moved from Japan to America at age 18, has taught her daughter her native language.
“I talk to my mom’s relatives who speak Japanese,” Rosenthal said. “I have to know Japanese to communicate with them. They speak a tiny bit of English, but since they live in Japan, they speak the native language.”
When Rosenthal visits her relatives in Japan twice a year, she uses her comprehension and speaking skills on a daily basis. Instead of finding herself completely lost in a foreign country, Rosenthal says she adapts well to the new environment.
“I can actually live there and get around town,” Rosenthal said. “That way I can understand signs and directions; I know where I am. It’s not really the kind of place I could see myself living in, though. I like how life is in America; everything’s expensive in Japan.”
Although she practices Japanese, Rosenthal must also take Spanish class for school credits. She says the ability to compare and contrast the structure of the two languages benefits her understanding of her classes.
“Knowing [Spanish] is good because it makes me think more,” Rosenthal said. “Spanish is written out in words, but Japanese is in characters. They are basically pictures.”
“I prefer English, though. Japanese has so many characters; you have to think really hard about what you’re writing.”
Rosenthal’s linguistic abilities often come as a surprise for her friends and acquaintances.
“People always have the same reaction when they find out,” Rosenthal said. “They want me to say something in Japanese. They don’t care what it is; they just want to hear it.”
Rosenthal has no specific plans to use her ability in the future, but says she appreciates the possibilities.
“I just think it’s good to be able to speak it,” Rosenthal said. “Maybe I’ll be able to talk to foreign companies in a future career. I don’t have any career plans yet because if I decide that now, it closes doors for other paths.”
Secretary Yoko Kilbourne, also from Japan, looks forward to speaking to Rosenthal in Japanese in the future.
“In the 10-plus years that I’ve been working in the office, this year is the second time that I have met a student who speaks Japanese quite well,” Kilbourne said. “The first student who spoke Japanese well was Angela Work [’06]. She often went by her Japanese middle name, Akiko. We spoke in Japanese from time to time.”
Like Rosenthal, Work found that Spanish class seemed simple after working on Japanese, Kilbourne says.
“One of the reasons Akiko came to Fresno Christian was because her Japanese mother was strict in home schooling, especially in the Japanese language,” Kilbourne said. “Compared to her mother’s Japanese class, Akiko thought it was a breeze to study Spanish at Fresno Christian.”
Kilbourne says rehearsing the language is vital to correctly learning the necessary style.
“Mrs. Rosenthal wants her daughter to speak Japanese as often as possible, and I’d love to be able to do that with Kristen,” Kilbourne said. “But so far, it hasn’t been conducive.”
