I’ve always viewed Japanese as an attractive sounding language, even though I’m passed my weeb days at age 29, I still enjoy listening to the language. I need some practicality though when I’m investing thousands of hours of my life into one language. I have Spanish and Hindi as options as well, my heart is telling me to learn Japanese but my brain is telling me there’s no payoff in learning it.
I want to travel to Japan, I’m never going to live and work there. My friend from Florida is an English teacher in Japan, after 6 years he’s coming back to the states because he said he never felt welcomed in their society.
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> weeb days at age 29,
Can you tell me what this means? I know it’s some kind of insult to people who study Japanese but I don’t get what you mean by it in this context or how to address the rest of your post based on this information.
Anyway it’s not that useful in most cases outside of Japan. Most people study to enjoy Japanese media, because they live/work in Japan, or for some personal reason like they are of Japanese descent or just want the challenge, or they like how it sounds.
I casually studied Japanese during the pandemic as a way to pass the time until I could travel to Japan again. When I finally went to Japan in October 2022, what I learned did make me feel more at ease with the language barrier, but I wouldn’t say it was necessary to enjoy my trip. It takes a looong time to become “fluent” in Japanese. Is it worth all that time and effort to visit one country? I’d say Spanish would be a better use of your time, plus it opens up your travels to many countries.
Sorry, I deviated from the original question. I live in Canada and there are very few Japanese people here, so learning the language has not been useful at all when I’m not traveling to Japan.
Even if you don’t plan on living in Japan, it’s still a pretty rewarding hobby.
What do you mean by *payoff* though?
Japanese is a beautiful language but if you’re looking for “payoff” for your “thousands of hours”, you are absolutely not a good fit for Japan.
u either want to learn Japanese or u don’t
asking strangers on the internet who know nothing about u to come up with good reasons for u to learn a language is so weird
if u don’t see a payoff then don’t do it
the “payoff” should be learning the language itself. don’t attempt to learn it so someone will give you a medal
It depends what your goal is. If your goal is to study a challenging language that you like listening to, then the learning itself is your reward. If you enjoy the process, then it’s 100% worth it.
If you’re only going through the process because you want a specific end goal (“I want to be able to speak with X foreigners, get X job opportunities, etc.”), then it sounds like Japanese won’t have as much payoff for your situation.
For me, I have a similar life situation, but I just enjoy languages. Japanese is the “game” I’ve decided to chip away at for the next 5-10 years, and I don’t really care what comes after that. Any practical gains are a bonus, not the goal.
So the question is, why do you want to learn a new language? Once you know that, you can work backwards from there.
Be aware that, thanks to the immense amount of kanji numbers and their combinations ie words, climbing slowly on the grammar ladder, you’ll spend a lot of time consuming potentially boring, basic and trivial stuff, compared to the media/literature you’re used to consuming every day while enjoying it, before you reach the level where you find the content easy enough to just absorb it without the need of memorizing. Until then satisfaction from learning will have to be enough as your pay off because, believe me, you’re not gonna enjoy the content. But at least you won’t have (probably) to learn to speak or write so it will take less time to get you “there”.
When you learn a language it’s not only about “words”, you learn a whole new culture and you start to understand your own culture by that, details that you would never think of, you will start to notice. I’m not English native, so to hammer my English, I stayed for months at an international Discord server, and I could pass my whole day listen about other countries cultures. Do you know that watermelon is a vegetable in Czech Republic?
Asides that it’s cool, it’s fun, turns you able to speak with 200MM people more and all the midia stuff, leaning Japanese will make you able to search things in Japanese at google, you could teach or translate things to gain some extra money, just some things that I quickly think of.
You said that your heart says to you to learn Japanese. It’s one of the best feelings for me when you can watch movies, animes and say to others that you were studying, you are improving yourself doing something that you like.
In top of the other comments here, learning a new language is supposedly good for mental health, so, why not?
from what you’ve said here I recommend against learning japanese, it’s a huge amount of time and effort for what sounds like very little payoff. learn Hindi or Spanish, or simply don’t learn a second language at all; no-one’s making you do it
> I need some practicality though when I’m investing thousands of hours of my life into one language.
If you need other people to try to give you a practical reason to learn Japanese, bearing in mind the other stuff you’ve told us in your post, you should save yourself the time and learn Spanish or maybe Chinese instead.
In that case, just take a survival Japanese course and call it a day. Japan is pretty easy compared to other parts of Asia but knowing some basics is always helpful in-country.
Plenty of people have given you a wide variety of good answers, but I just feel the need to address this:
>My friend from Florida is an English teacher in Japan, after 6 years he’s coming back to the states because he said he never felt welcomed in their society.
So what you’re saying here is that *one* person — a person who spent his six years in japan performing a single job function that defines and identifies him to those around him as the “token foreigner” — didn’t “feel” welcome in Japanese society.
I have no idea how well your friend speaks Japanese, or to what degree he even attempted to assimilate or integrate into the Japanese community around him, but the fact that he was still teaching English (which I assume means Eikaiwa or an ALT position, and not as a “serious” tenured lecturer or professor) kind of suggests that — at least to a degree — he was content to just kind of coast along by virtue of being a native English speaker.
I don’t say this to disparage your friend — no one is obligated to master Japanese or integrate into Japanese society any more than they want to — but just to point out that there are plenty of people who *have* made rewarding lives and careers for themselves in Japan, and the personal experiences of your friend don’t represent some universal truth about what sort of place Japan.
(This isn’t to say that living and working in Japan is for you — judging by everything you say, it probably isn’t — but it just bugs me when people jump to conclusions about Japan being xenophobic/exclusionary based upon the second-hand experiences of people who may or may not have made an effort to become part of the local community.)
Is it the most useful language to know outside of Japan? No
It is a useful language to know in general? Yes
There is tons of Japanese natives or Japanese speakers out there in the world to “meet & greet” and about a godzillaton of online Japanese resources to explore, which are either untranslated or poorly translated (read: localized).