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Why do you want to learn Japanese?

forumninja

後輩
6 Nov 2012
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Hi, I just wanted to start a thread here asking people why they wanted to study Japanese.

As for me, I was just interested in languages and traveling. I came over to Japan as an exchange student for one year and the better I got at the language the more enjoyable my life in Japan became.

After going back to the UK after my first year, I wanted to go back to Japan to continue using my Japanese as I thought it would be a shame if I forgot it. And 18 years later here I am.

And I certainly didn't forget Japanese.

So why are you into Japanese?
 
I want to learn Japanese so I can someday live there and start a Nonprofit that caters to helping disabled children and continue efforts towards building Planned Giving in Asia.
 
I want to learn Japanese so I can someday live there and start a Nonprofit that caters to helping disabled children and continue efforts towards building Planned Giving in Asia.

Wow, that sounds really interesting. How did you get into that?
 
I really just fell into it. I was in finance for a number of years then decided to take a break and teach English in the Republic of Georgia. After I finished my contract I returned back to the US and got a job working at a local private Women's college here in my hometown where I still currently work. That led me into Nonprofit work, fundraising to help establish scholarships, help underprivileged high school girls get into college etc. I took the job simply because the economy was so bad at the time I didn't really have any other choice. But it turned out to be one of the best decisions I've ever made :)

How are you enjoying Japan after the 18 year hiatus?
 
I followed the otaku path to Japan. (video games, anime)

Once there, I discovered I really like everything else about the country too. :p
 
I work for a large North American semi-conductor firm, and we have many Japanese vendors and sub-contractors. We rely on them for English communication because we don't have anyone in our department who speaks Japanese. And due to proprietary restrictions we can't get our own outside translator. So myself and a few others have added learning Japanese as part of our corporate career development plans. If/when we pass JLPT N2 it will mean a nice promotion and a lot of new career opportunities within the company.

It is also a nice backup plan in case the company ever downsizes. Having passed N2 would be a really big plus in the "additional skills" column, especially if job hunting in the semi-conductor field.
 
I think the culture is interesting and it would be a mental challenge to learn to speak it.

Not half the challenge it is to live here (anything other than short-term, anyway) without learning to speak it.
 
At first, I wanted to be able to play classic video games in their original language but came to realize, once I could actually play them and understand most of the dialogue, I got bored playing games. Now I'm only studying to not forget what I've learned as well as for the sake of a sense of self-improvement. Even though it doesn't feel like it, I notice from time to time I have improved. I doubt I will ever have any practical use for the japanese language but it still appeals to me and I consider it as a sort of friend. Since I don't have a real goal or ultimate purpose with learning japanese, if I ever become fluent it is just a result of this process.
 
I think it depends on the game. The trick with games is to plough through them without worrying too much about the details, particularly if it's set in some fantasy land where everything is named with obscure kanji or random katakana combinations.

If you get really stuck, 攻略 (walkthrough) is the magic word. There is a 攻略 site for every game in existence (and probably for some that haven't even come out yet).
 
I actually did the opposite. I noticed that just skim reading and playing through games without taking any notes made me forget new things I learned. So instead I started to transcribe every single piece of dialogue, even the one about dwarven armor smiths and strange things which I would never encounter in a real life japanese setting, and took them apart into grammatical components. At around a vocabulary of 15 000 words in total, I noticed that instead of having to look in the dictionary constantly, the same words and combinations started to reappear over and over and instead of analyzing sentences, I could understand most of them directly.

A good thing doing parallel to playing games is to read texts by people who share your ideas. In this way you can feel the authors intention which makes it easier to logically put together things into something that makes sense. I started reading texts by a japanese teacher who seemed kind of anti establishment, anti globalization, anti paper money etc and after a few hundred of his texts full of colorful metaphors I got the rythm for how japanese words make sense and are connected in a bigger sense. I improved my japanese "logic" by reading things by someone sharing some of my ideas. This in turn was something I then applied on video games which started making a lot more sense. Although some colloquial and classical expressions confuse me and there are situations I never encountered before which need to be analyzed and learned. That's why I come to this forum to get help. Overall however, using these two methods I managed to get to a point where video games were playable and mostly understandable.
 
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