like these are some crazy comments that i read
i didn't experience any language attrition in english because i do
still speak to my family at home and no i don't have a chinese accent
michigan is triggered that is a michigan accent that you're hearing
um
so why do i live with chinese people in japan we are going on a road trip
today and we have a little bitty car and seven
people let's go
i'm Anming i was born and raised in detroit michigan
and moved over to asia for the first time in 2012
after graduating and i've been here ever since
literally from the very beginning i was living with chinese roommates
like from the time i got here and i did that on purpose i just really wanted to
be immersed in the language and culture and none of my roommates ever spoke
english so even though i was an english teacher
during my day job when i came home like after work outside of that english
school it was all local language all the time we take
trips together we eat together all the roommates will
hang out together and we do a lot of stuff together and
you've seen that in many videos and we like it very much
i was just walking down the street one day back in 2015
the very first time i ever came to japan for a vacation
and i asked a girl to take my picture and she did
and i ended up talking to her and i realized she was not a local that she
was actually chinese and she was really surprised that i
could speak chinese we ended up chatting it up exchanging
information i went to her house a few days later to
meet her roommates and have dinner with them she introduced
me to her landlord and guess which house that was
right here i'm in that house now five years later
it's the second time i've lived here and we get along great and we have a really
good time together we have adventures together and it's really
so there are little characters written on each one of those rocks
and then you throw it at the wall and if you hit the wall
then your blessing comes true
the best thing about living with my chinese roommates here is just always having that feeling of belonging
you know when you move to another country if you have an apartment by
yourself you can feel really lonely even though it's nice to have
your own privacy in your own bathroom in your own kitchen and you don't have to
share anymore like i have to share but at the same time i think that'd be
terribly lonely like i don't have family here
if you move to another country don't cut yourself off too much like that it might
be a better idea to live with some other people
rather than to live by yourself
so for most of us we're not able to live with chinese or japanese people for
eight years like i have and i definitely didn't have a chance to
live with any japanese people when i was in china no i lived with chinese
people then so i had to use language exchange to
kind of substitute that and it worked great because i just hung out with
japanese people on the weekends all the time
i met 200 people on this one language exchange app
and i put the link down below in the description of this video and also in
the comments section so you can download it for free and give
it a try but you have to be very aggressive about
it how did i meet 200 people well because i sent out message after message
after message they didn't just come to me actually i
put a lot of effort into it i searched for people in my area in my
city and i sent out about 40 messages a day
maybe 20 30 percent of people would respond and then from
that number i could get a few people to actually meet with me
so the big thing to eat here in sendai is cow tongue that's the
the famous dish here is cow tongue yeah right there
but i'll be honest i don't want to eat cow tongue
so this is going to be one of those situations where i just
smile and eat other stuff
i guess i'm really gonna be that person who comes and
eats at a kfc well i'm not on vacation i really do live here
so i i eat lots of japanese food but um when there's only one thing on the menu
like there's literally only one thing on the restaurant menu and that's
cow tongue you you could literally get nothing else but cow tongue
yeah i don't want to eat it and i'm gonna be honest about that
i did try it once a long time ago and i don't like it i tried it
i think in japan i think somebody tricked me into trying it and lo and
behold even with them not telling me what it
was i still didn't care for it so um yeah i didn't i mean
don't knock it until you try but i did try it i don't care for those things so
i guess the best thing you can do in those situations is just try to be polite
i mean i live here now i'm from michigan
i live here now but that doesn't mean that i'm completely cut off from
from everyone in the us and i do go back by the way
i do go back to the united states about once every year and it's a pretty long
time i'll go back for a month or two unfortunately this year it's just not
going to happen because of the situation but
i do like to spend about 10 months abroad in about two months back home
and i got to see my family you know one day somehow i can get back to china it's
still closed off to foreign students so i've been oh my gosh you know i was
supposed to only be here for like five months it's now been a year that i've
been in japan i've been delayed by that much delayed by seven months and
counting so i don't know how much longer i'll be
here in japan but um it's been so long now that i had to
change my visa i had to get a job here at least a part-time job or i was gonna
get kicked out so um
don't feel bad though if uh if you like my japan videos and you're concerned
that i'm gonna go back to china one day remember i got the best of both worlds
going on here i can do a china video in japan i can do a japan
video in china and while i have a ton of chinese
friends here in japan i have a ton of japanese friends in
china so when i go back to china i'm gonna be
doing a lot of videos about the japanese community over there
so stay tuned because this is a hybrid channel and i'm gonna balance it with both
so that's my story that's how i ended up
living with six chinese roommates here in japan for
the time being and stay tuned because there will be