Lesson 1－Part 1
a samurai was visiting Yokohama. //
It was a special place. //
It was one of the few ports in Japan /
open to foreign trade. //
A lot of foreigners came there. //
That samurai was good at speaking Dutch. //
That was the most popular foreign language /
in Japan then. //
In Yokohama, /
he tried to talk with foreigners. //
But he had a lot of difficulty. //
Nobody understood him. //
He wrote, /
“In Yokohama, /
foreigners did not understand me at all. /
I also could not read signs. /
Then I realized /
that they were English words.” //
He discovered something surprising. //
Almost all Europeans there /
spoke English. //
He thought he had to learn it, /
and he wanted to learn it. //
The samurai was Fukuzawa Yukichi. //
