Senior Candace Kim will address via videotape a group of Japanese language teachers at a national conference this weekend in Boston. Kim will explain how studying the Japanese language has helped her grow as a person.

The opportunity arose when AP Japanese teacher Jaimelyn Tateyama asked Kim to write a statement about how studying the Japanese language impacted her. 

“She was very motivated to learn last year, and she helped a lot of students [in the class],” Tateyama said. “I wanted her to talk about her growth as a person.”

“I wanted to be able to better communicate with my family,” Kim said of her efforts to become more fluent in the language.

Her mother is from Japan, and she has relatives who live there, making learning the language more meaningful and motivating, she said.

Tateyama said she asked Kim to write and videotape her speech to play during the meeting of Japanese language teachers at the conference. Tateyama is a national director of the  American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages, which is planning the event.

“I asked her to speak, assuming she was going to deliver it in English, but she did it in Japanese, and I was so impressed,” Tateyama said. 

“I wanted to challenge myself,” Kim said of her decision to write about and record her speech in Japanese.