The first animé I ever watched was Pocket Monsters, better known in the Western world as Pokémon. I didn't know it at the time, but Pokémon is from Japan; that's why it's classified as animé.
For all you beginners out there, Pokémon follows the adventures of a 10-year-old boy named Ash Ketchum (Satoshi in Japan), whose goal is to become a Pokémon master.
The show had 270 episodes (273 in Japan) and ran for almost five years (1998-2003 in the US, 1997-2002 in Japan). It first aired in Japan on 1 April 1997, and in the US on 8 September 1998.
Back when the show first aired, I was almost six years old, and I had virtually no knowledge of Japanese. My brother Ryan happened to collect some trading cards for the Pokémon trading card game, and I saw that some of them were from Japan, and therefore, had Japanese written on them.
It's obvious that Pokémon is an abbreviation of Pocket Monsters, but when I was around six years old, I couldn't for the life of me make out the Japanese characters. I was in elementary school, and so I had little exposure to foreign languages.
But now, I'm a master of foreign languages, including Japanese, although I still need some practice to read some of those symbols with lots of strokes (Kanji, as they are called in Japanese).
No comments:
Post a Comment