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If I study Japanese...

Muz1234

Sempai
13 Aug 2014
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I wake up everyday, I think to myself, should I study Japanese? Or just not studying? If I do study Japanese, should I use the language, whenever I am in my home country, as this is a foreign language. I like to learn Arabic too, but I don't know which language to decide in studying and focusing...
 
The main problem with Japanese is that it's only spoken in one country. So it has limited use. But it really depends on you and your goals.
 
When you live in Japan, do you experience any discrimination for a foreigner?
 
Where I live I don't get to use Japanese unless I go out of my way to speak it, though I get a little practice using it thanks to some translation work I do. I'm still grateful for this skillset, and when I do go to Japan, it is immensely helpful and has really increased my enjoyment of Japan by orders of magnitude.

In Japan, you might get judged based on your appearance, but when you show that you have at least made an effort to speak their language, it breaks down a lot of barriers. BUT I can't say my experience as a caucasian foreigner would be the same as someone with a different ethnic background. I can't even say other white travelers will have the same experiences. I seem to be blessed; I love Japan more with each trip, and dive deeper into the culture, and it feels like my family just expands.

If you never have plans to visit Japan, that really limits how much you can use the language... maybe there's a local Japanese expat community you want to participate in, or maybe you just want to watch anime or Japanese movies in their native language, or play video games... otherwise it's just an interesting challenge, and if you like learning new languages, it's more fun to learn than English at least.

So, rather than asking whether you should study Japanese, you should tell us why you want to study Japanese. If you aren't excited about it, or would rather learn another language, you aren't going to have much success.
 
Like what?

Just various things. I don't go looking for discrimination though and tend to assume other reasons for incidences, attitudes, and the like. Sometimes it is pretty obvious that the treatment is because you are a foreigner other times you could look at it and just think, "He/She must be having a bad day.".

I'm not going to call out anything specific because then you might go looking for it, and if you go looking for it you will find it whether it is really there or not. I wouldn't worry about it if I were you.
 
Depends on how you are aiming to use japanese language its not so easy to learn either. I learned in bit and piece, with the help of conversations with my JP friends and watching lots on japanese netflix. There are lots of customs, traditions and cultural aspects you need to learn along the way to understand this language.
 
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