LLearn Japanese

What was your initial reason for wanting to learn Japanese?

Why did you originally want to learn Japanese? Are there any ways learning Japanese benefitted you that you didn’t originally expect?

46 comments

  1. > Why did you originally want to learn Japanese?

    I was a bit bored and I guess it just turned into a self-perpetuating habit

    > Are there any ways learning Japanese benefitted you that you didn’t originally expect?

    Asking questions online has been useful for me, and I didn’t think “gee I’ll ask hundreds of questions online” when I first started.

  2. Anime without subs, like most people, as well as wanting to play games in their original format. Plus being able to communicate with the creators of such things, and not wanting to be monolingual my whole life. It’s expanded beyond that a bit, with me really getting into Japanese music and god the language itself is just so beautiful. Japanese just has this smooth flowing sound to it that no other language can match. Part of why the music’s so good

  3. >Why did you originally want to learn Japanese?

    For years I loved Samurai movies but that didn’t motivate me enough. A couple years ago I started watching a show called Midnight Diner on Netflix and listening to the soundtrack. For years I was studying French on Duolingo, and one day pulled up Japanese to see what I had going on.

    From there I came here and started going thru the starters guide, etc. I suppose to answer your question, I found Japanese Cultural exports so entertaining I wanted to understand them better by learning the language and TBH, my OCD brain kind of does this thing where when it wants to learn something it dives in till it gets boring or tedious but for now Genki I is my textbook

    >Are there any ways learning Japanese benefited you that you didn’t originally expect?

    Not that I didn’t expect but I suspect at age 50, doing things that stretch me cognitively will have a tremendous impact as I get older

  4. There were lines in Japanese music and literature I would stumble across that I thought were very beautiful:

    Proverb: 実るほど頭をたれろ稲穂かな – The boughs that bear the most [fruit] hang the lowest i.e. the humblest people have the most wisdom/achievements/skills.

    The currently popular: 世界は残酷だ、それでも君を愛すよ – I know the world is cruel, but nevertheless, I love you.

    I am also curious about Japanese literature, but it felt so out of reach for me to read in the original language, until I got a professional opportunity in Japan, giving me the true opportunity to learn it almost fulltime hehe

  5. I have always liked manga since I was little and got hooked on JRPGs in my teens. Which led to me falling in love with the culture.

  6. I started Japanese wanting to connect with gamers and understand “JP only” materials that were always locked behind untranslated world guide books, unique novelizations and such. Anime and manga was a side thing – since I was satisfied with English translations (Not anymore though). I also do conlang and worldbuilding – so learning Japanese was great inspiration for my hobby.

    Studying Japanese soon became about reading novels and enjoying so many series on a much deeper level and wanting to actually write my next novel based on a high fantasy archaic Japanese-like system about faith, transience and the power of the written word. Surprisingly… outside of things like Earthsea, these concepts are rare in English, but fairly common in Japanese. I am far from my goal still, but the journey has been interesting. I need to learn a few more languages still (Japanese is my 4th or 5th depending on how you look at it.)

  7. I always like the mysticism in Japanese Shinto religion. Personally, an Indian person who hates my own religion, my plan is to solely adhere to Buddhist practices, because it is where I get peace of mind.
    So yeah, I pretty much started learning Japanese to understand Buddhist Sutras, and Shinto Writings.

  8. I got really into J-rock and wanted to be able to understand the lyrics.

    I never originally thought I wanted to live and work in Japan but one thing led to another and here I am. Been here 6 years now and probably will be for the rest of my life.

  9. Tbh I was intrigued since the one time i listened to raw anime and understood norhing of it…but even tho that stuck with me, i actually started learning about 10 years later…when my gf was using duolingo for learning italian…i picked it up for japanese…. And although i dropped duo after about a month or so, i never dropped japanese ever since my first day…

    I honestly dont even know if I have a reason for wanting to learn, let alone study as much as I did initially (8-12 hrs/day for 2 yrs)..other than what i mentioned at thebeginning..i just know that i got obsessed with the language from the moment i laid eyes on the first hiragana character

    I did start learning korean from japanese and italian from spanish not too long ago…so maybe im just a language junky 😭

  10. Watched anime as a kid b/c older sister did, got interested in the language, forgot about anime, and the rest is history

  11. I was curious about how the Japanese writing system works and so one day I looked it up in Wikipedia and started learning Hiragana and then I just kept going (with many breaks inbetween, but hey I’m still at it)

  12. I got myself in trouble in high school, and to keep me out of trouble, they assigned me to an exchange student to show him around and help him with American high school culture. While this may not have been the best idea my school ever had, I made my first friend from Japan – and then developed a huge crush on him. I never asked him out because he’d be going home after the semester, but we kept in contact until we both finished high school. Because of this, a friend I already had mentioned he’d lived in Japan for years as a kid because his dad was in the military. He introduced me to anime. This was a long time ago. He just had VHS tapes with no subtitles, so he hooked the VCR up to the TV through his Amiga and subtitled for me on the fly. He also talked a lot about the choices he made and why he didn’t translate things “perfectly.” That made me really interested in the language. I kept meaning to get a book and tapes, but life got busy once I graduated. I still watched a lot of anime, this time with subs, and picked up quite a bit. A totally different friend gave me his Genki books and CDs when I was about 30, and I started learning, finally.

    This eventually led to being on forums and text chats for people either learning Japanese or speakers of Japanese wanting to improve their English. I got to help do some fan subs – mostly by taking their literal translations and making them “more American”, and I even got to sing the English background vocals for a band. That was tons of fun. Now, I have friends in Japan, and if I ever manage to visit, they’re going to show me places and take me to way more stationery stores than is safe for my bank account. 🙂

  13. Puns.

    Once I realized how many puns I’ve missed when I didn’t know English yet, and how much japanese content is out there, I just had to understand them.

  16. >Why did you originally want to learn Japanese?

    A journey.

    American schools mostly teach European-derived history. When I was in 7th grade, we studied three non-Western countries instead. Those were: Kenya, India …and Japan. I really liked Japan. That’s just grown over the last 48 years.

    I prefer to watch foreign films with subtitles, so I can hear the original language. I got to hear Japanese, and thought it was a beautiful language. Really got into the Studio Ghibli films.

    Somewhere along the way, “learn Japanese” got on my bucket list.

    Close friends are into all things Japan. Started binging anime with them when hanging out. As in so into it, they know a lot of the American voice actors.

    Then the pandemic hit.

    I watch TV shows when I use my exercise bike. Serious dramas and police procedurals were too much. I escaped into anime. Of course I watched subs.

    800 hours of anime later, I started wondering if I should take a class. Friend said she’d take a class if it was online. I looked…it was online. I signed up and she didn’t. A different friend had taken classes elsewhere and has joined my class as well, and we study together.

    So I’ve been studying Japanese since October.

    >Are there any ways learning Japanese benefitted you that you didn’t originally expect?

    Friend I was out of touch with for years is now a study buddy. Like another commenter, I’m deliberately exercising my brain, at age 59. Plus, though it’s difficult, it’s a lot of fun, and it’s catering to my inner linguistics geek. Learning a non-Indo-European language with a non-Latin alphabet is a nice stretch. And, I get a real rush every time something “clicks” or I understand something I’m listening to.

  17. The Like a Dragon/Yakuza games. They made me want to learn the language and visit Japan

  18. No friends, no job, no skills, never left the city, barely left my room, never left the country, never had any intimacy bla bla, felt very sorry for myself and had no idea what to do with my life.

    Randomly decided to start learning a language I was interested in because I felt it was a more productive way of spending my infinite free time than doing something that didn’t matter like playing video games all day.

    I have absolutely no idea how it’ll benefit me in the future, but at least it’ll be something I’ll have with me for the rest of my life, just like how I have English and I’m able to communicate all this because of it.

  19. I’ve always wanted to learn another language different than the Latin based alphabet like in English and Spanish – which I know. Japanese I chose it because I’m taking a trip to Japan later and I took a Japanese class back in high school. Always found it interesting to learn.

  21. I was a bit of a weeb when I was 13 or 14, and I was really into things like Pokémon and one or two anime series. After hanging around on the Internet to talk about stuff like that, I started self-studying. I was already really into linguistics and grammar, and found Japanese really fascinating. And it was a change to the French we were forced to learn in school that I was hopeless at.

    Kind of eased back on the anime since then, and found a love for Japanese history to encourage me to take a degree in it.

    I just think having to think about Japanese grammar has made learning other languages and understanding some linguistic concepts so much easier. I’m making decent progress on self-studying Mandarin thanks to the things I learned doing Japanese.

  22. It makes your holiday to Japan more fun.

    I found in Japanese a hobby I never thought I would. I really resented language learning and non-STEM subjects when I was in school and now I consider doing a masters in a language or linguistics.

    I think what I like a lot about Japanese is that the communities on Reddit found good ways to solutionise the tricky parts. Learning Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji are quite a big undertaking but with a good combination of apps and websites it really comes together in quite a cool gamefied way that languages never were growing up.

    I also think that I get quite frustrated as I learn something that the learning slows down, so I occasionally look for things to start again with and with Japanese I had to go all the way back to learning an alphabet so it’s paid off.

    I’m now living in Japan too so that helped in the long run!

  23. I thought 漢字 were cool but my high school didn’t offer Chinese

  25. I was pissed at light novels not being translated fast enough or not being translated at all. So I took matters into my own hands

  26. I’ve been reading scalations for a VERY long time. And all the fan groups- which I still trust more than most official sources- were recruiting foe either people with editing skills like redrawing, typsetting, etc, which usually requires Photoshop… and I will never put any money towards Photoshop. While I suppose that programs like GIMP do the same, many groups were very specific about using only Photoshop.

    Which left the other, though more difficult, option: learn the language itself.. In addition, lots of stuff was still showing up untranslated, and people wanted to know “Wait, what is this character saying? Or what’s the summary say?”, the latter for LNs.

    Let’s just say I always seem to set life on Hard Mode for myself. Anyways, I’ve ultimately made the move to Japan, so knowing Japanese is EXTREMELY handy, though I’m still low level.

  28. For me it was a mixture of spur of a spur of the moment decision because I was bored and a desire to understand some of the jokes of an anime I was watching. Two years later and while I’m no closer to understanding those jokes, I am getting ready to take the N4 in July.

    As for unexpected benefits, I ended up digging myself out of my minor depression and have made more progress with the development of myself than I had made in the previous decade. It genuinely changed my life and helped me become a better person who understands more of what I actually want out of life. I would do it again in a heartbeat, even if I had to start over from scratch.

  29. I’m planning to study and work there, pretty simple right? But it has been crossing my mind to try something new and I’ve heard that Japan is a peaceful place so why not live my whole life there

  30. I was always fascinated by Asian languages. When I was a kid I was studying Chinese for a few months but I didn’t really like the pronunciation aspect. And later in university I realized that Japanese also looks as peculiar as Chinese but it sounds so much better. So I instantly fell in love with the language. Love for anime came much later.

  31. Fun story, my buddy wanted to watch anime and convinced me to take Japanese with him instead of Spanish.

    This event lead to me moving to Japan, getting married, buying a house, having kids, the whole deal.

  32. Couldn’t read the station signs the first time I went in 2017. Just wanted to know hiragana and katakana when I got home, so I could understand the signs next time since I knew I’d come back. Didn’t even watch anime outside of dubbed Pokemon as a kid.

    Currently working on my N3. Any ways I’ve benefited? Well, every time I’m in Japan, it opens up way more things to do for me and whoever’s travelling with me. Makes everything easier. Also helped me gain Japanese friends.

  33. I just want to understand what “yametekudasai” and “iku” means in the first place, then i felt in love with this language. That is how i started learning Japanese.

  34. Needed some foreign language credits at university. Ended up wanting to try living in Japan for a year or two, so decided to study it more seriously. Then got married to a Japanese man and have been living here for more than five years. Although it was to be expected, learning it really benefited me in terms of surviving in this country. Knowing how to communicate with doctors and professionals really made a difference. I didn’t want to depend on my husband as much as possible because I’m the type to force myself into practical situations in order to learn.

  35. This anime I watched has about a 3-4 year gap between each season and the light novel is only in Japanese, so here I am.

  36. I set out to finally understand the Rust memory model by reading the relevant chapters in the Nomicon, and then I said “nah, I’d rather do something easy and relaxing instead”.

  37. I had a layover going back from working in China to the US and decided to extend it a week because I’d never been to Japan and didn’t have any other plans. I realized I could read a lot of the characters on signs and menus and thought Japanese was just a Chinese dialect so decided to take some time to “learn the pronunciation” lmao

  38. Phonetics. I wanted to learn a new language, one with a non-Roman alphabet. Eyesight was too bad for arabic, was torn between other asian languages. Did Japanese because the consonant-vowel structure of each letter is rhythmic and poetic.

  39. I’ve been a weeb for so long, everyone thought I spoke Japanese at a decent level. Not true, so I thought it was high time reality met expectations.

  40. Bit of an odd one here, but… we were actually forced to do it at school. It was like an hour a week, and beyond basic Hiragana and phrases, it was mostly an excuse to muck around. I mean, I always found samurai and ninja cool but it wasn’t really linked to what we were doing.

    And then the year 2000 came around and suddenly there was an explosion and modern pop culture things around the place and it finally… clicked. Haven’t looked back since.

  41. I had to take two semesters of a language to graduate college. We had Spanish, Italian, French, German, Latin, and Japanese available. I enjoyed the Japanese part of world history, and I wasn’t too bad with language classes in general so I wanted a challenge.

    Then I just fell in love with the language and I’m still active learning it nearly 5 years later. クレン先生、ありがとうがざいます！

    Something I didn’t expect is how entertainment can be used to learn rather than a benefit of learning. I watch shows, play games, and read in Japanese and it’s gotten to a point where it’s fun and something I look forward to.

  43. Sorry for the walk of text

    I decided last year that I wanted to study abroad. My first choice was New Zealand but they were completely closed still. Then I wanted to go to Russia, but…yeah that came to a screeching halt pretty quick. I didn’t have much interest in Japan initially because I thought to go to a Japanese university for an exchange semester you had to be fluent in Japanese. I had always been very interested in japan since highschool, when I got really into Japanese cars, anime, music, all that stuff. I didn’t even think that my university offered a program there, though, so I thought it was off the table. I booked an appointment with an advisor and he gave me the options. Only one of the schools that he had showed me required you to be fluent in Japanese.

    I decided to study abroad the spring semester of 2023. Applications to apply to the university weren’t even open until July and I decided on Japan in February of 2022. My advisor was somewhat against this idea as Japan was very unknown as to when or if you would get a CoE, but I had made my mind up that Japan was the place. After months of waiting just for the application period to open up I had already been so dead-set on going to Japan that there was no amount of talking me out of it. As luck would have it, the application deadline for my university in Japan ended the day that Japan had opened up again. I hadn’t even started studying Japanese yet because I had some weird mental conundrum where I felt like if I started studying Japanese and got deep into it my hopes would be crushed (I can’t really explain it but it was weird). Anyways, I got accepted into the program in December. I still hadn’t started studying yet. January of 2023 rolls around and now I was just waiting for my CoE. At this point I had started to get really serious about my studies, as I had soon learned that you can’t just learn Japanese visa osmosis, and especially not after a 6-month study abroad period. Even though everything wasn’t for sure yet I decided to just jump in. I quickly realized that it didn’t even matter to me if I got my Certificate or not, as my mind had been occupied 24/7 on how to study Japanese and what I can do to improve. I ended up getting my CoE, and then it was time for the visa application. I am really bad about overthinking so I thought maybe I’d receive horrible news that my visa would be denied. I kept studying, though, thinking that all this hard work ought to be rewarded if the universe has any type of empathy. I got my visa 3 days ago, and I am still studying Japanese. I am currently 16 days away from leaving for Japan, something I thought could never happen until I had a real job making real money and had vacation time. Taking the leap over a year ago to bet on something that was so far away might have been really stupid, but it opened me up to learning a language that I thought was inaccessible for the average person, and the opportunity to go to a place that I thought I would never have the chance to spend a lot of time in. Sometimes putting all your eggs in one basket isn’t the brightest thing to do, but it was the reason I started studying this language, and I am very glad I did, even if I wasn’t going abroad.

  44. I was tired of waiting for more manga chapters and knowing there’s like 5 more but in Japanese

  45. To be able to watch anime without sub. Also i was practicing aikido then too. Now, it helps me “read” imported Japanese food at our supermarket..haha

  46. I liked the music and the grammar was similar to my native language, I haven’t made much progress but I’m learning slowly

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