Im surprised you think so, I find (traditional and simplified) chinese much more beautiful than japanese personally haha
I am not that surprised about simplified Chinese, but traditional ones are beautiful in a different way; but yeah, I saw differing opinions before too. I feel that Kanji have a certain aesthetic to them.
I am interested in Chinese, but also want to connect with the regional dialect I came from and used to. Mandarin Chinese (普通话) feels different though. I don’t exactly hate that, but there are certainly taste of forced modernism and bitterness.
Yeah and they have some originals aswell
Like that one with the hot fox
honestly couldn’t bother to remember anything else about it
This is interesting to me. My dad’s an Arab but he didn’t teach me Arabic. I’ve always been a little self-conscious about that. I learned on my own some of the basics (the alphabet and greetings), but I’m not currently in a situation where learning Arabic would benefit me. We descendants of immigrants are certainly not a monolith!
That reminds me of the big challenge I faced trying to learn Arabic in the past. The dialect that’s most commonly taught is fusHa (Modern Standard Arabic), which is great for watching the news but almost totally useless in day-to-day conversations. I’d run words by my Arabic-speaking friends and almost invariably heard laughter followed by, “Nobody actually talks like that!”
I took a quarter of Mandarin (with Simplified Chinese) in school. I like the look of Traditional Chinese characters better too, but I have to admit that Simplified Chinese was probably easier to learn in those days when we were taught and tested by hand! I was disappointed that my Japanese knowledge wasn’t more useful in Chinese. I want to go back and learn Mandarin or Cantonese because I’m a huge fan of 60s–80s wuxia films, but I’m not sure which dialect would be more useful for that.
You’ll experience that feeling more and more often as you progress. By the time you hit level 60, it’ll feel like a night-and-day transformation! I still have to use a dictionary more often than I’d like, but it really does feel good to finally hit a decent “cruising” speed!
There are a billion different reasons for me. The first is that I love learning languages in general because you inevitably learn about different cultures, people, and ways of life. I decided to learn Japanese specifically because I listen to a lot of Japanese music and read a lot of Japanese poetry. A lot gets lost in translation and I would love gain a deeper understanding of the things I am interested in. Another reason is that Japanese feels close to home because I am half Chinese, and I love the folklore of both cultures.
I am learning Japanese as lot less material made towards a female audience gets English translation so I want to be able to read shoujo and play otome games without having to worry about the language barrier.
My parents (father only) and grandparents speak Cantonese from my knowledge.
龍 is rad (and Wanikani teaches it as it’s still a fairly common Kanji for dragon, although 竜 is the official shinjitai form in Japanese.
It gets worse with horse. In simplified, what is that susposed to be? Where are the legs, did they got chopped off
Then again, Simplified is kind of moot in the age of computers as most people don’t need to write them out.
Probably get there in about another year or so, already close to Guru± 1000 Kanji soon.
The quote “He who learns a new language acquires a new soul” really made me do it. Studying a foreign language, I believe, is genuinely the next step in personal development.
Also, I enjoy the learning process and that continuous ah-hah moments when what I learned is on the Anime I’m watching… and surprising Japanese people out in the wild. xD I live in South Africa and there are very, very, very few non-native Japanese people that can speak their mother tongue. It’s always a pleasure engaging with them.
I actually met my first 2 Japanese friends this year. An uncanny coincidence. One’s an Expat that’s been living here since the 90’s and the other visits here regularly. Both were pleasantly surprised and extremely happy I spoke their language and that’s enough of a reward for me.
I was studying a degree in a different topic during the pandemic and when the spring semester finished this year I was dazed, tired and… Bored. I was so lethally bored. I thought abt pivoting my degree to another subject and looked through what had open waitlists. Japanese came up. I spent some days thinking on it and realized some of my favorite authors are Japanese (Mieko Kawakami, Hitomi Kanehara, Sayaka Murata) and the thought of being able to one day read all their works without having to wait for translations was enough to sway me. I started studying a little during the summer, got the Genki textbooks and spent hours at the library with Japanese grammar dictionaries.
But I didn’t get in. The waitlist didn’t move. I was upset for a while, and felt incredibly stupid for investing so much time and energy when it didn’t seem to amount to anything. And then my health (and social life) went upside down, my fall semester is reduced hours to cope with that, and I find myself having a lot of time on my hands. Learning Japanese makes me want to wake up even on bad painful days. I’m making steady progress. On the days I go in to university I spend most of it at the library sitting with the kanji and vocabulary books. It makes me happy. It makes the day seem more structured and meaningful.
I’m the last scion of a noble family that got broken up during the war. I stand to inherit vast wealth and control of the ancient estate, but only if I learn the language by the time I’m 30.
Kidding.
I had various reasons when I started, but now I just study to kill time at work. This limits my study to material that’s easy to study at work - so WK, a little reading, and no speaking or listening practice. Occasionally I hop into Bunpro, only to find that to the extent that I’ve mastered the material, it’s because I memorized the sentences and answers, not the grammar.
It’s created kind of a catch-22, where I find the study unrewarding because I don’t feel like I’m advancing and I still struggle even with pretty basic stuff, but I don’t want to practice listening and speaking because I’m even worse at those and it’s hard and demoralizing. I feel like if I did iTalki or similar it might help… but then I feel like I’d just be wasting time and money if I didn’t at least get in some more practice on my own first. Which I don’t do. Also, social anxiety or something.
I have this problem too. One small thing that helps: in Settings, go to “General” on the left, then set “Hide English” to “Yes.” I find that if I force myself to read the Japanese first, that at last gets me reading some Japanese. I still have that same habit of recognizing what to type from the beginning of the sentence, but at least it’s a few milliseconds of vocab practice!
I have social anxiety too. I had my first italki appointment ever last week and you can find at least three posts here where I was freaking out about it! In my experience, it helped me if to do other, more comfortable kinds of practice first. For me, that’s video games and video game tie-in books (like art books, mooks, and light novels) and anime on Netflix with Japanese/no subtitles for listening practice. That made me feel a bit more confident when italki time rolled around.
I just had my second appointment last night. Even with my social anxiety, I had a great time. I really like my teacher as a person, so once the awkward introductions were out of the way, the conversation flowed like butter!
My Grandma’s parents immigrated to Hawaii during the 1920’s before Hawaii was even a state. Her parents decided to leave one of their children (her little sister) back in Japan. My grandma doesn’t know why, but I can only guess that it was because they were unsure if bringing a newborn with them would be safe, they also probably didn’t have enough money so they left her with a family in Japan. Growing up during that time her family tried their best to “become American” so while my grandma spoke some Japanese in the home it was always something they tried to not call attention to. A few members of her family were sent to the concentration camps during WW2, her nephew was even one of the babies born while being imprisoned.
It’s one of the many stains in American history, people being forced to give up who they are in order to assimilate. Being reassured that yes, you’re American and you have the rights of any other American… but also not.
I decided to start learning Japanese because it’s part of my family and it’s something that should never have been stamped out due to America’s racism. I know that it happens and that’s just a part of life, but it still makes me angry. If anyone has the chance to visit Manzanar in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California please do. The winds in that area are strong as hell and yet there’s still a sakura tree flourishing in the courtyard. Sakura blossoms are quite delicate and they fall from the tree easily, and yet when I visited, the tree was in full bloom. Having adapted to the harsh environment the blossoms refused to budge despite the constant winds.
I started because I wanted to travel more to Japan,(I still wish to) however I currently use it as a way to teach myself focus and to practice centering myself. Learning a language is learning to be the happy mistake maker, so is life. We make mistakes, then we die. Our ego is our true enemy, give it too much importance and it will drive you crazy. I can be very wrong, I know little, life is a class, and I am a student. I am only human. It is through this daily practice that I try to recognize and accept that fact. With the hopes of eventually enjoying a better life experience.
So I can translate Doujins for my parents.
Honestly, I’ve developed a multitude of reasons why I’m studying Japanese, reasons other people here have mentioned. I love the way it sounds and looks, I want to experience Japanese content like a native, and I’m interested in the culture itself. Why I’m really learning though, is because, somehow, I’ve stuck with it, albeit off and on, for several years now. I get bored easily, I am quick to move on to something more interesting, etc etc, so I’m notoriously bad at keeping any sort of hobby going. Somehow, miraculously, I keep learning Japanese. The Japanese language feels like an old, comforting friend of mine. So I figured that I should stick with it, I guess.
how much practice did you have before that? It is something that I’d like to do to enhance my skills (WK lvl 33 now), but I don’t think I could even begin to have a basic conversation. I can recognize kanji / words pretty well and do alright when reading, but it is like I have 0 recall when it comes to conversation.
That’s normal of course, since I have done next to nothing to strengthen it… But I don’t know how useful it would be to jump into iTalki if my speaking / comprehension is that bad.
I fell in love with the anime like 人類は衰退しました(Humanity has declined) and Shimoneta, before finding out that they only had one season and untranslated light novels.
This happened over and over again. Unfinished shows and untranslated (or terribly fan-translated) source material.
Finding out that less popular anime I love will probably never have their later light novel volumes translated broke my heart.
I’m studying Japanese so one day I’ll be able to one day experience these books that will never be popular again. And maybe if I’m lucky I’ll be skilled enough to translate some of them for other people like me.
TLDR: The sooner you start having conversations, the sooner you will become more comfortable with having conversations. Don’t worry about what you can’t do, just do the best you can and you will slowly build your foundation off of that. I couldn’t put together a sentence longer than a few words when I started talking.
The only practice I had before was a 10 second “すみません、日本人ですか？日本語を勉強しています！えーと。。。それだけです” at a shop and when I ordered some food at a Japanese restaurant.
When I started practicing speaking, I was around level ~40 and would never read/use Japanese outside of wanikani and watching movies/series/anime.
I had to check, but it’s been just over a month since I started taking lessons. I now feel very comfortable speaking, explaining my thoughts and asking “how, why, what, when” when I hear my tutor say something I don’t understand; which has helped me be able to search and read answers in Japanese as well.
They often offer a “Conversation Practice” lesson and an actual lesson where they go through textbooks, etc. I prefer studying by myself since the information is all out there online, and using the lessons to practice actual conversation. A bonus is that the conversation practice lessons are also cheaper, since they don’t require any preparation from the tutor.
It really comes down to how many hours you rack up in conversation practice/immersion and I’m still nowhere near fluent. This is just my experience (I’ve been averaging 3 lessons a week.)
I like to compare it to how a baby learns a language, they are just immersed in it and gradually pick it up.
At first I wanted to watch anime without the need for subtitles, or read the true manga source, but my motivation kind of faltered after a while.
Over time I’ve started to appreciate the small parts of Japanese culture, philosophy, and politics that have been translated for me, and I really want to dive deeper to broaden my perspective. I have lived my entire life in the western world, and I feel like I might be missing something important.
I still enjoy manga and anime, and I’ll probably be doing amateur translating projects to practice my Japanese, but my main motivations have changed a little.