掲示板 Forums - Why are you studying Japanese?

I started studying Japanese because I'm a major language nerd :P I've studied, for various lengths of time, Japanese, Spanish, ASL, Old English, and Hebrew, but like several people have already mentioned, my frist foray into foreign language was Spanish... but I loved it (and still do!) - I studied Spanish for 12 years (1st grade on), but as much as I loved it, by the time I got to high school I just felt like it was too easy, and I wanted to try studying a more difficult language. My high school (and about a dozen other public high schools in my area) had a program where kids could study topics not usually offered at public high schools - there were crazy things like robotics, aviation, pre-law... and for languages they offered Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. Now, my mother is of Russian descent, and she studied Russian in college, so she wanted me to study Russian. However, two of my friends (one of whom was an exchange student from Argentina, the other interestingly enough was also in my Spanish class) were really into anime etc and were going to take Japanese. I thought it would be easier/more fun to take a language with friends so I'd have ready study/conversation partners, and that was that. I was still studying Spanish though, which made things really interesting (there was one time when the word 'battery' appeared on a vocab list in both classes in the same week - pila for Spanish, 電池 for Japanese - and I had the tests on the same day. I couldn't for the *life* of me remember the Spanish - on the first test - and ended up just writing でんち in kana on my Spanish test! Fortunately, my Spanish teacher was awesome - if I could be half as wonderful a teacher as she was, I'll count myself lucky - and upon asking me what the heck I'd written, actually gave me half-credit!)
The more I studied Japanese, the more I fell in love with it, and the more interested I became in the culture, history, etc... and before I knew it, I was an East Asian Studies major in college, lived for three years (well, 2.5) in the Japanese House, and studied abroad at Keio University for a semester. After that semester in Japan I knew I had to go back, and here I am on my 5th (and last! :'( ) year on the JET Programme, and in my 12th year of studying Japanese. Now to complete the circle I'm hoping to become a Japanese teacher in the US, if I can find a job!

[quote author=mysticfive link=topic=137.msg9008#msg9008 date=1329455850]and in my 12th year of studying Japanese.[/quote]

I finally found out how long you've been studying for! No wonder you are so helpful. ;)

What a necroed topic, BTW. I see it's been resurrected a few times over the years. :o Some interesting reads, though!

Started out watching DBZ, Pokemon and Ranma 1/2 (although it was Tranformers and stuff many years previously that I had no idea were anime - since I didn't know what "anime" was when I was a kid), then branched out into heaps of different anime: Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, etc (etc).

Funny thing is, my reasons for coming to Japan nearly four years ago are a bit different than my motivation today. I was a big anime fan at the time, had totally planned to come on JET before going back to university to finish my degree because of that and because I liked the food, culture, history etc.

I got married in my second year here, and after JET tried for months to get a job so we could stay here. My reasons these days are for my family's sake, because I am still interested in the language and culture, and because I just want to be more rooted in Japan itself. After four years of struggling forward, these past few months have been great, just working in a Japanese school and overcoming my frustrations.

Long, long way to go before I will be comfortable with the language, let alone fluent; but people tell me I am improving and making progress; and that is good enough for me. :)

@Mysticfire - 12 years! Wow xD Like Gecko said, you seem to be quite helpful and I always see your name on this website. Had a look at your achievements too and quite an active user ~ Got a question for you, I've been looking at books to study from mainly for grammar with English translation and been searching for some in Japan but I dont like how a book has Korean and Chinese explanation in them as well. Its just a bit too much. Any recommendation? JLPT N3 is my level.

@Geckomayhem - Thats pretty much the same reason as me for studying Japanese. Although im not married but doing it for girlfriend of over 2 years and my love for Japan is a huge motivation for me.

Yeah I have Kanzen Master which I think the grammar points were for JLPT N5-N4 level. I thought it was brilliant. Simple and easy on the eyes with not too much information. Unlike a lot of textbooks which has so much explanation and translation.

Nihongo-so-Matome is the book with the money on the front cover, right? It looks good too. Did consider it but I thought I research a bit more and ask for a second opinion before I commit myself to buying these textbooks. After all these are textbooks and they cost a bomb.

You teach English, right? A lot of Japanese friends tend to study from textbooks and I dont think they study from websites like we do with Renshuu.org for example. Do you know if your students study from websites for their english in the same way as do with Japanese.

Well, I've had a vague interest in Japanese for several years, which mainly came up as a response to my interests in video games, some of which were either Japan-only or had some Japanese-only installments that piqued my interest. However, as I matured I came up with more "valid" reasons for wanting to learn the language. I'd say that as far as academic subjects go, I'm much more of a language nerd than I am a math whiz. (In fact, I'm really not great at math, sadly.) Thus, it's easy for me to stay motivated and just [i]want[/i] to keep learning more. I've even considered studying other languages, like Korean and French, and have been meaning to brush up on my Spanish. I think another reason I'm so interested in the language is that it's just so different from English. In a way it's like solving a puzzle, plus I just think it would be really neat to know such a difficult language. Yet another reason it that I think in a way, it appeals to the more artistic part of me. Writing kanji and such feels almost like drawing, and I'll happily sit down and just fill notebook pages full of kanji.

I've always loved languages and was lucky enough to live in a bilingual area when growing up. It really alters your perception of language when you're surrounded by two compeltely different languages. When I was 12 I started studying English, and that was my 5th language. I'm up to 10 at the moment. With Japanese at #8. I'm sure it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone that I ended up studying Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Uni and have a Masters in Computer Lingusitics :) Still, the one language that always struck me as both simple and complicated was Japanese. After i got my masters I was supposed to just visit my friends in Japan for 2 months before going back to school, but ended up getting a job offer on my second day there and stayed for 5 years. Japanese is easily my favorite language. Because I never formally studied Japanese I didn't feel confident about JLPT and never really considered doing any of the levels until last December. I passed N2 with flying colors and am now studying for N1. I'm planning on going back to Japan at the end of the year, and I don't want to be the foreigner in the office who's fluent but whose client correspondence needs to be checked by a native speaker before hitting send. I'm considering doing Kanji Kentei after I pass N1...

[quote author=あつや link=topic_id=137&post_id=25515#rmsg_25515 date=1331272727]I learned because i suddenly got interested in my mom's side (japanese) of the family. I spoke japanese my whole life but i wasn't fluent, i usually spoke the easy stuff like good morning, and the phrase you say when you get home. I've been studying on my own, and right now im on vocabulary/kanji. After i can fully understand japanese and i can read and write, i plan on learning one of the dialects.[/quote] I wish you the best of luck. It's easy to say "when I've got this down pat", but in reality, language learning is, for most people, a rather long and complicated process. Even with the family background it will prove to be challenging to a varying degree. But at least you can talk to your mum more and more as the language starts to settle in! Not everyone struggles immensely, but everyone has to practice, practice, practice!

I just love Japan, so I decided to learn more about it... I started when I was around 6, so I don't know details...

I was bought up within two cultures and my lifestyle and choices I make in life didn't fit into either one.

Then I discovered JRock and the people around who already liked and soon I found out that , it was that fandom where I fitted in the most.

I was at a low point in my life and listening the JRock basically kept me alive and learning Japanese gave me an aim in life.

When it comes to Japan; I am quiet person and all the countries I have been to are noisy and loud, whereas when I researched about Japan I found that it was more of quiet country and thought that I would fit in there more.

The more I study the language and culture/country the more I like it. Now I plan to move and live in Japan in the future.

Ps: Yes, anime and manga also took part in my liking Japan/Japanese.

Despite my own family's descent being Japanese, none of us really cared nor explored the cultural side of things. As a sansei (third generation Japanese immigrant), my grandmother gave up speaking Japanese, cultural traditions, and just about everything else associated with her ethnicity and moved to the mainland away from Hawaii and its Japanese community. My father, a yonsei, never gave it any pause for thought, being half-Japanese just meant that he looked different than his peers. As such, there was little to kindle my interest growing up. I lived in a small rural community that was content with just living day to day in their small world. But as I grew older and moved to the city I began interacting with students with rich family histories, second/third generation Americans that still had strong ties to their parent's countries. I was a gosei in a crowd full of nisei and sansei, simply American with no other handle. It was from here that I started retracing family history. This caught my grandmother's interest and now we're slowing piecing together our heritage once more. We don't even know where her grandparents came from, so progress has been slow. Luckily old family documents exist, they're just lost in a box somewhere. In summary, I've taken up Japanese not only because I love language learning, but because it helps me connect with my past, and as an artist it opens up new avenues for my photography and music (Not to mention learning Japanese helps me get by since I live in Japan now). It's truly been a worthwhile endeavor.