In June this year I had a business trip to Seattle. It was my first time to visit the U.S.A.

I've been looked up to the U.S.A. for some reason since my childfood. I'm not sure the reasons for that, but that might be because the U.S.A. was a faraway place where my father went when he got something awesome like a prize.

About three month ago, my boss asked me and some of colleagues to go to a related company at Seattle and have deep meetings. We could go with an interpreter between Japanese and English and I had been interested in the U.S.A., so there is no reason to reject it.

I can't write about what we did there, but this experience made a big impact on me related to English. Even though I and they communicated with on a chat app everyday, I almost couldn't understand what they said! I could read and write English a little bit, but this trip taught me that I totally couldn't listen to and speak English. In Japanese school learning English means just reading and writing English and I studied English only when I was in junior high school and high school, so the result was natural but it was disappointing.

After that, I've been studying English and especially focusing on listening to and speaking English.