What are your main goals for learning Japanese?

I know, right? The intellectual stimulation of learning a foreign language is so rewarding in itself! I actually started to read manga and really watch anime after I started learning Japanese, as a way of language immersion. And now I really enjoy it (but I wouldn’t want to read a manga or watch an anime in English, haha)!

Sounds pretty impressive with an MA in philosophy of biology, by the way! :muscle:

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Why would that be a weak goal? Sounds like a great inner motivation to feel that you really want to do something, without having to motivate it with some other reason! :smile:

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Main goal: I want to learn Japanese so I can have less misunderstandings with my husband.

Others:
I really really want to learn a second language
I want to write a Children’s play

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Hmm… don’t really have an end goal…

But I have few objectives, to pass JLPT N1 - though to be honest they only test mainly your reading and comprehension skills, but it is nice to have.

Most Japanese learners and Japanese native speakers themselves labelled me as ‘fluent’, but I feel that I’m still ‘Lower Advance’ learner and I’ve hit a plateau right now, and I found WaniKani has helped me a lot (I wish I knew about WK, in my early stage of Japanese learning).

Though I guess, Language learning has no end tbh.
Good luck with the revision everyone =3

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Problem is my inner motivation is generally not good, I’m counting on it to get me to a point of no-return but if it fails before that I’ll have no strong reason to hold me and that would be a problem.

Some Japanese errr… umm… video clips… on the internet doesn’t have subtitles so I need to understand the storyline behind it.

I mean look at those delicious food and sightseeing destinations that they’re describing! I need to know how they made those food and how to get there.

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Videoclips yes.
And those games showing japanese culture in all its glory.

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Continuing the discussion from What are your main goals for learning Japanese?:

I want to hear more about this Children’s play idea!

The further I go down this road (which I’ve been on for like 10 years on/off), the more I don’t really know, actually. I used to be way into anime and manga, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve completely stopped watching or reading them. I actually spend a lot of my time listening to Japanese music, watching news, and keeping up with variety shows. I feel like I’m becoming more of a normal Japanese viewer at this point and genuinely just watch and listen to content as a person in the US would with english content.

I know enough Japanese to understand a bit of what is being talked about in the shows, but I never took that final step to actually learn how to hold a conversation or think in Japanese that I feel would help so much. So that’s what I’m committing to now in 2021.

i don’ t think this goal is weak at all, liking something is the best motivation you can get.

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I enjoy living in Japan and I enjoyed learning Japanese. At this point Japanese and Japan have become a huge part of my identity. I guess I just like learning more because out in the wild, I like understanding what’s going on around me.

Also, I’m still a voracious reader. English, Japanese, whatever. I read it.

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Hm. A couple reasons I guess. Mostly for the journey itself, so same reason :wink: Getting to know new things is a reward in itself. Also I experienced that knowing more means every new thing is that much easier to learn - although that might not apply to Japanese language learning since it is so different than the roman / german / slavic ones. I have always been a generalist (prefer to know something about everything than everything about something), so that also plays a role.

Also because of the culture, I want to know more, I want to visit, so I also want to at least be on a “barely-communicative” level. Although I did return to learning Japanese after reading a manga that I liked a lot, actually I don’t really see it as a goal (being able to read manga in Japanese that is). Yea, nice bonus, but that’s not it.

And… umm… because I like to surprise people :wink: Yes, petty, but still oh so entertaining :smiley: A long time ago when I was playing board games and card games (CCGs) one of my friends told me something I totally agree with: The biggest pleasure is not in winning the game - the pleasure is making your opponent go HUH WHAT? :smiley:

So yea, there :slight_smile:

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I was a kindergarten teacher and we did these musicals every year. My favourite holiday is Setsubun so I want to make a play about that. The kids can play the teachers, kids. Oni, and Oni minions.
Teachers keep getting mad at the kids for disruptions but it is actually Oni. Oni is jelous that he can’t go to school like the kids so he gets the kids in trouble.kids find out that Oni is allergic to beans and fight him off!

But in the end they invite Oni to be a part of the class.
Haha I like the idea of 6 year olds pretending to be teachers.

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Initially I was interested in reading technical documentation in Japanese, especially for the Clip Studio Paint digital art program. The software itself is translated into English, but there are many useful user-contributed materials (add-ons) that are only documented in Japanese. Importing them into the program will import their names and descriptions in 日本語. Also there are worthwhile art tutorials that havent been translated.

Now I am interested in learning Japanese for its own sake.

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I have had to move to Japan in the past year to live with my wife. So for me it is just essential to get around day to day and to do my job.

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I’m aggressively new here and I’m so pumped there’s a forum cus I love forums a lot.

So, my day job right now is drawing/writing comics. I got into it from having read a lot of manga when I was younger and now as an adult I’ve realized that even though I don’t draw in anything that really resembles a manga style it has been the most important influence in my work. Then I realized there was an IMMENSE amount of work that will probably never get a translation in my lifetime and a lot of the type of manga I’m interested in will just never reach the US. I’ve collected a lot of manga that I had the goal of translating myself someday. I also work with publishers pretty directly and am interested in liscensing for some of these untranslated works and I’d love to have a hand in it. There’s also a ton of reference material for manga that would help me with my work and I’d love to see some of that stuff in the hands of creators everywhere.

The final straw for me weirdly was not manga but a few weeks ago I read an english translated Osamu Dazai book and the whole time I was thinking about how little I felt I could trust the translation and there was something about it that made me feel like I wasn’t actually reading the book and it really got under my skin.

I also have friends who live in Japan and some in manga and I guess a small part of me has always seen them and fantasized about living someplace that takes the medium I work in a lot more seriously than where I am now (the States).

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The reason I started learning Japanese was because I liked the way it sounded and genuinely enjoy learning languages.

I have managed to stay on the journey despite many large breaks simply because it adds a discipline to my life that I think I need and I also find it so rewarding when I see the improvements I’ve made and how much I actually can understand.

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My main goal is to communicate more fully with my family. I married a Japanese woman who was a single mother. We live in Japan. I want everyone in our family to be as bilingual as possible.

Beyond communicating with them about life, I’d like to enjoy the TV programs more fully, and be able to have a better sense of the life and culture here, and then be able to get around town more conveniently. And I’d like to have more options, career-wise, down the road as my language skills improve.

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One of my biggest hobbies is to collect and use old computers, and through a game called 46億年物語THE進化論 (the game my profile picture comes from), I was introduced to the PC-98. By the sound of it, it seems like just another old DOS machine, but these are actually completely incompatible with IBM PC compatibles. One of the primary reasons it exists is because it has the capability of displaying kanji clearly. There is a rom on board that contains over 2000 kanji so the characters’ graphics didn’t have to be included in the program, which made it an extremely popular business machine in the 80s and early 90s. Of course being a hardware guy, I had to get one. After a couple hundred dollars and a bunch of soldering (replace capacitors, repair damaged traces from leaking caps), I had a working computer. It has excellent sound and graphics for the time. The only problem is that there is maybe under 50 games translated for the machine. While all the DOS commands were the same I was used to on western PCs, most of the error messages and UIs were in Japanese. While I could just point my camera at my screen and use google translate, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to learn a few words or whatever to see if I could make it any easier to use.

So basically, I’m learning it to dig into a huge library of software/games (yes, there is a shit ton of hentai, but it’s an open platform from japan, what do you expect. There are a lot of good non hentai games on there as well, which is what I’m after.) I never even knew existed until recently. Being able to understand anime might be a nice side effect. At this point, I’m more motivated by finding learning it to be fun.

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Got my paperwork in order to move to Japan as soon as the border opens. So, yeah, gotta learn everything super fast :).