By Leina Fieleke ‘21, JFOU Fellow 2021-2023

I’ll let you in on a secret. I used to hate learning Japanese.

By Leina Fieleke ‘21, JFOU Fellow

An art history professor I had at Oberlin would always take a moment after the class laughed at an artwork. “Why is this funny?” he would ask. Until then, not many people had asked me to explicitly express why something was funny. This is now, however, one of the most common questions I find myself asking while navigating a new country and culture.