I started because I wanted to play a sequel to a game I love. Which is only published in Japanese. Now I just like the challenge.
I also want to learn Scottish Gaelic. But that is different because I actually want to live there and it is a dying language.
People in Russia are barely speaking in anything except Russian. I’m already comfortable with English (have been reading in English since my childhood), that’s why I decided to learn an Asian language. I love the Japanese alphabet system and have been listening to Japanese music (mainly metal), so I decided on learning the language. It’s a fascinating language. English and Russian sound, to put it mildly, just meh compared to Japanese. Also, I’m a design major, so that’s also kind of professional interest. Japanese artists and designers always have been inspiring to me.
I would like to learn German in the future, due to the same reasons plus my “interest” in German history.
Twenty-odd years ago I saw Akira on BBC 2 and became fascinated with manga. I made a couple of half-arsed attempts back then to start learning the language so that I could read more of it but never really got anywhere.
Fast forward to last year and my partner was told she was going to Japan for a conference for a few days, so we hastily put together a holiday plan and extended her trip so we could go on holiday. I started WK then and haven’t stopped since. Partly because I want to go back and can now pick out bits in original manga, but also because at the time I was somewhat unhappy with my job, and being able to keep my brain active by sneaking in review sessions has a really positive effect.
Note: There’s a TLDR at the bottom for ya’ll, but hopefully, you’ll enjoy the full story more 
I’m going to apply for the JET program next October, hoping to get some Japanese under my belt before that. If you want the full story, read bellow, warning, it’s quite long.
That ambition may sound tame, but there’s a bit more of a story behind this if you want the full whammy. I come from a country who’se native language (Welsh) is essentially dead, the government are trying their hardest to preserve it, it’s on all the road signs and is a legal requirement for most privately owned stores over a certain size to have key signage in welsh (the reason I’m talking about Welsh will become apparent in a moment).
Unfortunately, despite the government’s best efforts, because of a rabid attempt at eradication of the language by the English education boards during the 1900’s (they would have a ‘welsh cane’ and whip students in the face that spoke welsh), unless you live in the north, there’s absolutely no reason to retain the language, and as such I deeply struggled to attain even a basic grasp of the language due to a pretty poor welsh education department.
Despite this I FUCKING LOVED languages, and I loved learning French and German at school, the foreign language department were all too eager to have me for GCSE level, and I was more than happy to oblige.
Unfortunately (this is the key part where Welsh is concerned) because I was in the top set classes for German and French, getting A’s and A*'s left right and center, the language department decided to put me in the ‘Accelerated Welsh’ classes, despite my repeated inability to demonstrate even a functional grasp of the language. I probably averaged an ‘E’ for most of my Welsh, despite this, no they were perfectly adamant I was perfect capable to be in the advanced classes. The Welsh department was eventually all redeployed not long after I left school due to gross incompetence (our classes had the worst results in the entirety of South Wales) and I managed to scrape a D in the end, only because the teachers decided to inflate our grades by giving us a script to read from during the oral examination, despite to say, I can’t fucking speak a single sentence of the language except for “I like coffee”. This was just the beginning of my fallout with languages from school.
So on top of being predicted A’s in a language I couldn’t even tell you what color my socks were in, and the expectations that came with that, I was also put into an accelerate French programme, which meant I was able to sit my French GCSE a year earlier than everyone else. The deal was, if I completed my GCSE, I would be permitted to sit my French AS level a year later when I was doing the second year of my other GCSEs. Essentially this meant I would walk out with 4/5 A levels (if I carried it on to A level) and 5 AS Levels instead of just 4. HOWEVER, after I completed my French GCSE, they told us the deal had changed, and we now had to sit a SPANISH GCSE instead! Now at this point, I only knew how to say “hola mi amigos!” an that’s it, and they expected us to get a full blown GSCE (which usually take 4 years of preparation) in 1 year…
Yeah by this point I had just had a fucking nough, my teachers had worn down all ambition I had, I fell into stem sciences for my A levels and go pushed down the route of trying to get into medicine just because I was ‘good’ at science, but I had spent the last five years not being listened to by my teachers about something I was truly passionate about, so eh, why not let them make my single most important life decisions for me and dictate what I should do in uni too? May as fuckin well.
Cue three years of absolute hell, got my degree but only fuckign barely. Got into therapy two years after, and as a challenge I decided to really listen to what I wanted for a change. I lost my job in a Genetics Lab due to stress (they deemed it incompetence but it was far from that, so many compounding issues) and it took until I was in London one day with my dad, we went to the Science Museum, and I realised how simply fucking bored I was there that I realised, though I liked science, as was certainly good at it, I didn’t care enough to make a career of it. We then headed over to the London Postal museum, and I can’t tell you what a blast of a time we had there. Something clicked that something wasn’t right, so I went back to look at what I really loved and what I wanted to do.
That’s when I relaised what I really loved was Cultural Anthropology, and by extension of that languages. The Postal Museum made me realise that I was more interested in people’s solutions to problems and their application than the actual science behind things, how these solutions evolve and how different cultures find different solutions to different problems, I remembered back to days as a child where I was completely enamored by ancient Egypt, how their beliefs shaped their technologies and cultures, all these ever changing, ever growing aspects, how language evolved and changes and becomes a reflection of that culture. So I set myself the task of learning the language I always wanted to learn but always told “No, it’s too hard, no that’s the language you can never learn! No it can’ be done, not by you”.
Japanese, I thought if I can do this, and still love every second of it, then Ill know I’m on hte right path to recovery and finding myself again. And guess, what, 8 months later, and I’m FUCKING loving every single second of this beautiful, fun, playful, rich and exciting language! I’ve never looked back, and moving forward I doubt I ever will. Fuck STEM, fuck teachers, fuck restrictive schooling sytstem, fuck not listening to my own wants and feelings, languages are here to stay.
TLDR; Extremely gifted language student, pushed into STEM subjects because of Teacher’s own biases, and my skill in those subjects (told there’s no money in Languages, cultural studies or Arts, and I’ll die starving and penniless) as well as completely fucking incompetent language department that couldn’t facilitate my learning needs on either side of the spectrum (when ever I needed support, or whenever I needed to be pushed harder), fell out of love with languages, when to uni for a Bio-science degree and fucking hated every second of it, years of therapy later, and decided to reignite that passion by really challenging myself with language that has always been described to me as ‘too difficult for you to learn!’, and have fallen in love once again, don’t find it challenging at all, it’s so much fun, now plan to travel abroad and maybe do a masters in Anthropology/Languages instead, really finding myself through this journey with you guys, so thank you each and every one of you reading this.
Depending on where you choose to live, you might not find much use for Gaelic!
I know it is not really usefull. But it is the official language of Scotland. Before the English ruined it! Scotland is trying to bring the language back. It is only really spoken in the northern hybrids but if I want to live in a place I should at least know the language. Since I already know English well enough I want to do my part to keep their language alive.
Wow that sounds intense. I am glad you still found your passion! I am still searching for mine :(.
It’s one of our official languages, that’s for sure. The country has an odd relationship with the language, to be honest. It’s still alive in the Western Isles and there are in increasing number of Gaelic schools around, but you also have people who think we should just let it be.
For my part, I can’t speak a word of it, but my brother-in-law is a native speaker and he’s a journalist for BBC Alba in Inverness so his job is a direct consequence of speaking the language. My sister studied it at university and my nieces go to a Gaelic school so they’ll probably be (at least) bilingual.
In Edinburgh, where I live, the only people I know who’ve sent their children to Gaelic school are American immigrants!
Yes I have heared as much. I don’t know. I went to Scotland on a holiday. Driving around Lochs and Inverness and I just fell in love. It is so cool that your brother is a journalist for BBC Alba. I watch their newsreports sometimes. Just to get used to the sound of the language. I did try their website for learning Gaelic. But I need to put more effort in when I actually start. And I can’t learn two languages at once. I still have a few good years before we can even move there so I have time. Well… consider me an american immigrant then xD. Even tho I come from the Netherlands :D!
I’ll say Anime played a big part and I have an interest in linguistics as well.
Growing up in India, Japan feels like a distant but familiar culture in a lot of ways so that keeps up my interest.
The country in the area is simply beautiful! I hope you manage to realise your goal of living here, and get another language under your belt!
The funny (not so funny) thing is, it happened to my brother on the other side of the spectrum too. He really wanted to do sciences, but he was dissuaded from doing so because the teachers were always comparing him to me, and how good I was at them, so he ended up doing an Ancient History degree (later transferred to Modern History studies I think) and we both wish at this point that we could swap our degrees XD
Yeah don’t listen to your teachers, listen to your heart, go back to when you were a child and figure out how that relates to what you’re doing now and why you ended up there. For me the link between Egyptoplogy, Language and Science was Anthropology, so I soon realized that’s what I truly wanted to do, and JET is my avenue to experience that to it’s fullest, living in Japan for 5 years or so will give me so much experience of another culture, that, for my whole life has been so closed off and inaccessible from the western world because of the language barrier, yet at the same time, seemingly so accessible because of first world technologies, smashing down that barrier will hopefully land me in a situation where I can truly find my calling in Anthropology and appreciating other cultures to their fullest.
Because staring at what looks like funny squiggles is annoying.
I have no illusions about living there, I don’t have the work ethic. And visiting seem also unlikely.
As a child I became intrigued by kanji and thought that the writing system was incredibly beautiful.
I’ve always enjoyed Japanese video games since about age 10.
When I watched anime a lot I thought that the sound of the language was amazing.
Since the language has been sort of passively fed to me throughout my life, not being able to understand it feels unacceptable
I absolutely love to learn languages. Studying and consuming Japanese is extremely fun to me and that’s what keeps me going. I don’t know anyone Japanese and I don’t necessarily plan to live there at all but that doesn’t mean that you can’t consume their media 
I’m certain I’m gonna go to Japan when I’m older many times, so I think it’s just respectful to show that you’ve taken time to learn their native language and also I think it would enhance my experience even more by actually understanding what is being said and not being that awkward foreigner saying the same common phrases every 5 seconds.
I also want to be somewhat of a polygot, being able to converse with people all over the world would be great. I am somewhat fluent in Spanish and my German is getting there. Next I want to possibly start learning French or maybe even Korean, but who knows. It’s been a lot of fun learning languages.
For the same reason as a lot of other people.
Among all the animes I’ve watched until now, Naruto especially stuck with me for a lot of reasons. But it was also the first anime where I discovered that you can actually watch shows in Japanese with subtitles, which was a game changer for me at the time. The only dub I knew was the horrendous German one, so the original dub definitely blew my mind.
I considered learning Japanese at several points as a teen but I never thought of it as an achieveable goal (“the writing system is so different”, “I don’t know where to begin” and so on). It was more of a distant, unattainable dream. It seemed like something that was only reserved for really hardcore nerds or [insert group of extraordinary people that I didn’t see myself in].
For a couple of years I lost my interest in anime/manga but caught up with Naruto from time to time because I wanted to know what happens next. By 2013, 2014 I was fully invested in it again, started to draw fan art, discovered Japanese artists on social media and my wish to understand the language firsthand and connect with other fans was bigger than ever.
So yeah, my love for a single series and all the small successes I’ve experienced in my Japanese journey so far have kept me going since over 2 years now. 
I want to learn to understand Japanese games and anime. But I feel I have personal connection with those lol.
Ah, good ole’ autocorrect! 
