I studied Spanish and German in high school. My new husband, who already spoke German, was now studying Japanese, and had a half-Japanese (and half-Chinese) friend. I got into studying it because I find all languages fascinating, and having him teach me was fun, and in any case I believe that a language teacher (which I am) should keep studying new languages in order to remember how language learners feel.
Then our half-Japanese friend brought a new wife back from Japan, who didn’t speak great English, just as I stopped teaching to raise a child. I started studying Japanese seriously, thinking that she and I would teach each other our languages.
For various reasons that didn’t happen, and I put Japanese on hold for many years.
At certain points I would pick up my books (or some new ones) and study some more, but the years passed without my doing much.
Ha—I was going to explain why my interest got piqued again, but given the details of my story, and the fact that I just revealed my city in another post, I don’t feel comfortable telling it. It would make me theoretically identifiable, plus reveal some stuff about other people. Not that we are anyone of that much interest, or that we’re doing anything that unique, but that’s how it works.
So, mostly I study Japanese because I just like languages, and I have had access to materials.
The idea that “Japanese has three alphabets” also resonates with me—I’ve always learned as many alphabets as I can get my hands on. At various times I’ve studied Braille, Gregg shorthand, semaphore, fingerspelling, the alphabets of Hebrew, Greece, and Russia, along with both qwerty and Dvorak keyboard layouts. I haven’t tackled Tolkien’s alphabets or runes (though some members of my household have), nor have I learned the Korean alphabet yet.
tl;dr: No real interest in anime or video games, nor any particular interest in Japan (although I like cultural interchange and get interested in any culture that I encounter), just happenstance combined with a bent toward linguistics.
