I’ve always wanted to learn a language, and have struggled to settle on one. I took two years of German, and while I liked the language, I was not interested in enough German culture to learn more of the language.
I’ve settled on Japanese because of how much interest I’ve expressed over the course of my life. For reference, I’m 21 and have regularly been engaging in some form of interest in Japanese media/things (Jrock/pop, JDM cars, anime, manga, art, history, etc.) for about eight years straight.
I understand becoming proficient takes around 2200 hours and is very difficult for a native English speaker such as myself. Is it worth all that time and effort? Japanese doesn’t seem all that useful outside of Japan, and what if I grow disinterested in Japan after investing a bunch of time into the language? What are the practical benefits of Japanese fluency?
TL;DR I’m unsure if learning Japanese is worth it, despite my constant, captivated interest in the country’s media/culture/products/etc. for a good amount of time.
16 comments
This question comes up now and then. It all depends on what you want. If you want money, career, love, and friends, Japanese is not a quick way to get those things.
Think about what it takes to get in really good physical shape: daily effort, both in terms of not doing things (like eating candy) and doing positive thing (running, weights).
So how long does it take to get in good shape? You’ll see results in a few months, but it’ll be years before people stop you on the street.
Or, think about learning piano. You’ll know you learned something after a month, but you won’t make money at it for quite some time.
You gotta find deep level cultural things to be into as well IMO.
I’ve been trying to learn more about the history, temples, and shinto as well. Shinto while not a religion is very ingrained in Japanese everything.
Yes it’s a hard language to learn. I’m like two months in myself and I still don’t know all the hiragana and katakana off hand and don’t even get me started on Kanji.
But it’s fun. It’s rewarding. Think about be able to watch your favourite anime in Japanese. As crazy as it sounds it adds a whole level of complexity to the show cause somethings don’t translate right.
My only annoyance is when I struggle to read katakana just for it to say “minto green” lmao
Give yourself goals. I wanna be able to read kids manga by years end. I’m getting close.
TLDR:
Stick to it.
Learn some culture outside of pop culture
Set small goals.
Stick to it.
Imagine yourself on your deathbed looking back at how you filled life with only *practical* things.
If coming from a purely practical standpoint, no. It isn’t. Languages like Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, etc. These languages are spoken by hundreds of millions or more.
But honestly, practicality isn’t going to get you through the studying. It’s liking the language itself. You may want to learn a practical language like Spanish but if it doesn’t speak to you on a fundamental level, it’d be harder to reach fluency. You already know what that’s like with German.
2200 hours?
yeah, def not worth it dude.
If you think about the time you spend learning a langauge as a price to pay for getting fluent, I don’t think you’ll find many languages “worth” learning. Learning a language to a point where you can understand most of what you come across takes a lot of time, let alone getting (anywhere near) fluent. Plus, you seem to know English already, and that’s the biggest language “worth” learning in practical terms (unless you have some very specific reasons to learn some other language).
In my opinion it’s only “worth” it if you enjoy the process of learning it and do have a geniune interest in the culture (beyond, say, wanting to watch anime without subtitles. Though that may be enough motivation for some, it’s certainly not for me)
Also, this is hardly ever mentioned in this subreddit, but apart from the practical value that learning Japanese may provide you (like being able to enjoy native non-translated content, or communicate with natives) you will also learn how to think and express yourself in a way that’s diametrically different from the way you’d do it in English. This may sound a bit abstract, or far fetched, but it really is something (at least for me, anyway).
Just my two cents, hope you’ve found that useful!
Edit: grammar
Just some quick background info on me: I have been studying Japanese for almost 20 years now, it was one of my majors in college, and I have lived in Japan about 10 years.
I first started studying Japanese not because I was particularly interested in the culture, and I was never into anime or manga. I just found the language interesting, and my interest in the culture came afterwards. Each language has its own worldview embedded in its vocabulary and grammar, if that makes any sense, haha, and the more I learned Japanese, the more I became interested in the culture that used this language. So much so that I decided to come here to live and work.
So as other posters have said, the answer to your question completely depends on your goals and interests in life. And you never know where some new interest will eventually take you and affect the course of your life. So branch out and explore!
From a purely practical standpoint, one of the few languages in the world “worth” learning, we already speak: English, a world language with over 1 billion native and non-native speakers, and the lingua franca of diplomacy, business, science, etc. If you speak English, you can likely communicate most places in the world. Which is why so many people are studying it around the world. But there are people who are perfectly content not to know English because their goals/interests do not lie outside their country of origin.
Also, people study languages just for fun or as hobbies. That’s how I got started out. If you enjoy studying languages, why not? So if you enjoy studying Japanese, its practicality is beside the point: as the old saying goes, “time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted time.”
Japanese is not really that difficult, when you look at it from a grammatical standpoint. People often mention how hard learning to read it is, but if you just want to converse in it, it’s not that difficult in my opinion.
Probably not.
Unless you’re going to live in Japan, or have some deep and serious passion for media that doesn’t get translations, it’s hard to justify in any rational way. I can’t imagine having poured the stupid amount of time I have into this just to watch anime without subtitles. I enjoy reading Japanese books well-enough – but I doubt my life would be any worse if I only read English books. Sure, it’s *nice* to know Japanese, but without a really pressing reason to I can’t imagine having mustered the enthusiasm to keep going.
But I guess it doesn’t hurt to start. Read a textbook, try some Anki decks – can you imagine doing that for every day for the next few years? Can you think of anything more useful you could be doing instead?
For me it doesn’t worth the time or money! It takes really long if we compare to other languages BUT I really enjoy the way. I think, this is all that matters. 🙂
Learning another language gives you a unique insight in a culture, which can’t be bad. It’s not strictly useful unless you move to Japan and or/marry someone from there, but I don’t at all regret spending a year getting the basics (N3), though I know I will never ever be fluent! I also speak/read three other languages in addition to my native language to a reasonable degree.
You’ve been interested in Japanese media for the last 8 years, I’d argue it would be pretty weird if you suddenly disliked all of it.
I’d recommend going to the country (if you can afford it), you’ll find it extremely clean and safe with fantastic food. You’ll also notice that the vast majority of young people in Tokyo speak good English, then you’ll feel ashamed that you can’t remember the 2 years of German you took in school and start learning like I did.
**In terms of practical benefits:**
Japanese is a popular language and is almost always in need of translators, the pay is also decent.
If you have a degree, you could work as an English support teacher in Japan (Knowing JP isn’t needed, but will be helpful).
There are also a large majority of manga, light novels, web novels, games etc.. that never get translated into English. If you know JP, then this won’t be a problem as you can play them in JP.
Knowing a second language makes you more attractive to employers. Particularly public service jobs where you might come into contact with people from other countries.
Practical usage is close to non existent outside of Japan. The likelihood of meeting a Japanese person outside of Japan is extremely low. The usage of Japanese in Japan isn’t really a game changer when you’re a Gaijin because you’ll always be considered a Gaijin regardless of Japanese speaking ability. Most Japanese media is already translated into many different languages due to how popular it is. It’s only worth learning if you want to for the sake of it.
So, did you end up learning it?
I’m always afraid of talking about this subject because it is unpopular to dwindle the will of people for studying something because it is always worth to learn something new no matter what.
But from my perspective… Japanese is nearly untannable you will never achieve to master the language so you will study knowing that it will take nearly 4-10 years to be fluent at it and Japanese people will not care about it, seriously. They don’t make the effort for you to learn Japanese they actually don’t want you to learn it, if you search a little about you will see that no online course from universities have Japanese even though we can find Korean and Chinese in many levels, you will see people complaining that even working in Japan and living there you are an eternal foreigner and I found out some guys complaining that they actually write way complicated Japanese to make your life harder in companies I heard about an engineering that work there and can understand Japanese, he found it funny because the projects came progressively and unnecessarily overcomplicated in matters of the language they simply don’t accept the fact that the guy was able to read it.
If you go even further they actually k*lled a politician who had proposed to simplify the alphabet adopting the romanization many years ago so you can imagine what is going on I even have some theories but I will keep it for me.
The language is in the top 25 languages more spoked, you have way more career oppurtinity I think by speaking japanese than other language like italians, I think japaneses are very into ai and stuff.
I personally think that you should learn Japanese because if you love anime and video games it’s a very valuable language to learn for media consumption and it will help you for your entire life