Welcome to WaniKani, and good luck!
My main reason for studying Japanese is to read all the awesome books that were never translated to English, I think
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So it’s necessary for you to learn Japanese at first place.
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Umm that’s good but I never saw a non-translated book in Japanese-Englsih
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Sort of required but not entirely though. My workplace is all English, and we have staff to help with any translation help, and that can assist with communicating with housing agencies, banks, the town halls etc. I work with people who’ve been here for years and never learned the language beyond some simple phrases and they get along fine.
I just really would like to integrate with the regular world outside of my work more!
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Love the language, become obsessed with it. Fair amount of masochism involved I guess. Probably has some benefits of being trilingual down the road.
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One day, I’d like to be able to read novels and communicate seamlessly. I also plan to visit Japan, and I feel becoming relatively fluent in the language would really help me understand the culture. What helps with all that, though, is the fact I became very interested in the language itself. There are many nuances in Japanese that don’t quite exist in English that I find fascinating.
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It’s definitely hard being a vegan/vegetarian in Japan. I’m vegetarian, but it feels difficult being really strict when there is dashi in everything. I understand the struggle! Tokyo has a lot of vegetarian/vegan restaurants, which makes it a little easier.
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Lots of doujin and niche stuff is fan-translated at best, though.
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Hello! I hope you don’t mind me correcting the heading.
Personally, I want to learn the language in case I visit the country in the future. It’s in my bucket list so it definitely has a place in me. By then, I want to be able to communicate and not be a mere tourist who relies on translations to comprehend stuff.
…and uhhh… probably a bragging right that I know another language aside from my native language and English. Hehehe…
Cheers and good luck to your journey!
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Honestly, didn’t have that much of a reason when I started it in high school. Languages are fun, kanji look cool, yeah whatever.
One full scholarship, a job hunting and eight years in Japan later, it has taken over my life and now it’s too late to do something about it, lol.
Not that I regret it, but I definitely didn’t see it coming (nor, I assume, did my parents when they naively accepted my request to attend Japanese classes by then, lol)
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I went to Japan last year, loved it but was disappointed about the bad English level the locals possess. Now that I want to visit Japan more often, learning Japanese would make life much easier and allow me to communicate with locals with fewer obstacles.
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I always though it would be amazing to speak another language, and I’ve always thought Chinese characters were cool. A few of my friends were already learning Chinese at uni, so I decided to learn Japanese instead.
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I’m a second generation Japanese here in Brazil, both my parents spoke Japanese but they didn’t teach any of their kids to speak the language. My mother spoke only nihongo when she was younger, because most of her neighbors were nihonjin, but when she moved out she started speaking more Portuguese, and nowadays she can understand and speak a little.
I was kinda frustrated because of that 
But I’ve seen several people in the same situation: instead of learning the language at home with their parents, they learn taking courses.
As an adult and having a job, I’ve decided to save money to learn a second language. My priority has always been English, and by learning it I could learn a third language, so here I am now trying to improve my English and learning Japanese.
I want to go to Japan, read novels, manga and watch anime… and understand what my relatives say in family meetings 
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So I can read visual novels that aren’t translated to English 
And practicing kanji is good memory workout.
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To read a Visual Novel Called Soukou Akki Muramasa specifically. But I want to read a lot more Japanese stuff as well.
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It’s kind of lame, but I started Japanese in highschool because I didn’t want to take French anymore. I really learned to like Japanese after a while and I’m still here. Now I have some friends in Japan and want to keep learning to talk with them.
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I learned German fluently as a college student, and then pretty good Spanish in my forties. It opened up Germany and parts of Spain to me - made them cheap and accessible and easy - and changed my life. I ended up living in Germany for twelve years, the last few in a moated castle, and there were beautiful architectural treasures all around me that were totally mine to explore alone, without tourists (I lived where the Grimm brothers wrote their fairy tales), and until the pandemic I’d been living part-time along the ocean in Asturias in Spain, spectacular world-class coastal scenery all to yourself ten months a year. Now I’m fifty, and I want to unlock Japan in that same way.
tldr: I want to shop at a Japanese convenience store.
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I hate the idea that the anime I watch, the VNs I read, etc are only partially getting through to me through bad translations or whatever, so I want to consume it straight from the source. Also, I like the way the Japanese language sounds. And it also gives me something to do that I enjoy.
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Anime/manga, games, traveling were the ones I already had. Then I got here and saw that the intermediate and advanced book club picks are often quite intriguing, so I added novels to that list.
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I turned right at Albuquerque and now I’m lost
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