- Why You Started: Well wayy back I started watching anime when I was kid, which was my first exposure to Japanese culture. Somewhere along the way I decided I wanted to learn Japanese… not exactly sure what my reason was.
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Why You Are Still Doing It: I play lots of video games, listen to lots of Japanese music and practice aikido so knowing Japanese would be a bonus for those, not just anime. Also Japanese is soooo nice to listen to in comparison to other languages, since there’s not much in my city that is Japanese-related. The reason I haven’t quit is WaniKani. Without it I’d have been floundering and feeling like I couldn’t make any progress anywhere. I’m happy that Wk exists to help create a rough structure in my learning. (Last year when I began, I met a guy on the bus who was studying Japanese, so I said hi and he introduced me to TextFugu, which lead me on to find WK once I realized it was dead
so anyway that is like a big important moment in my Japanese learning history) - Your Funniest Moment/Experience: There aren’t really that many yet, but I do remember having a hard time trying to to prove to my mum that いただきます isn’t a prayer and doesn’t actually have a proper translatable meaning as if it were a normal word. She just wouldn’t believe.
- Your Most Memorable Moment/Experience: Just all those little times I am able to read a word or even a sentence. Feelsgoodman
- External Help: Dabbled in HelloTalk. Wish I could find someone IRL though. Tempted to try it at university?
- Your Final Goal: I’d like to be able to speak, read, write and listen without too much trouble. Cliche, but, not looking up a dictionary every five seconds. Video games, anime, literature, and music will bow at my feet!
- Why You Started: I had already learned French and I wanted a challenge to determine whether I actually had a talent for foreign languages or if I was just good at French. I wanted to take a Chinese course at my university, but there was nothing available for the semester when I wanted to start. So, I picked Japanese and the rest is history.
- Why You Are Still Doing It: Three reasons: 1) I just finished grad school and I don’t think I can function without another great intellectual challenge in front of me. 2) I want to travel to Japan someday and be able to communicate with ease. 3) I’m gonna rewatch Naruto without subs one day.
- Your Funniest Moment/Experience: I haven’t really interacted with native speakers since my last Japanese class, so those moments have yet to come.
- Your Most Memorable Moment/Experience: Within my first month of studying Japanese, I went to a Japanese restaurant with my sister. The plates had おいしい written on them and I recognised the word immediately and got REALLY excited.
- External Help: Two semester-long classes taken one year apart were what got me started. Now I self study/suffer with Genki and the internet.
- Your Final Goal: Travel to Japan and talk to natives with minimal difficulty. Watch all of Naruto without subs. Use my Japanese as a strong launching point from which to continue studying Mandarin (I self studied that for a while and then stopped) and to start studying Korean (because the grammar is similar)
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I don’t know where you are from but respect for learning this language. Je vous félicite Catherine, vous êtes très doué!
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Merci beaucoup!!! Je suis américaine, mais j’habite en Écosse. I’m really in awe of all of the people from non-Anglophone countries who are learning Japanese via English with WaniKani.
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Thank you! Yep, it was totally awkward. I’m from NZ (and I clearly can’t explain myself properly in English either. 
)
- Why You Started: Interested in Japanese culture (anime, video games, jpop) and always wanted to be fluent in Japanese to understand Japanese pop culture. Also, I visit Japan about 2 times annually so I want to eventually be able to visit and do things like a local there.
- Why You Are Still Doing It: I met a Japanese girl in one of my university courses several months ago and we came to have feelings for each other. When the relationship became Long distance, I’m striving to become fluent in Japanese one day to communicate better with her.
- Your Funniest Moment/Experience: Nothing much yet
- Your Most Memorable Moment/Experience: Speaking extremely chunky Japanese with the girl I met on video call and just making a fool of myself
- External Help: not much so far, will probably go for real lessons when things are less busy for me (I’m a final year university student)
- Your Final Goal: To be fluent and conversant, so I can go to Japan and really understand everything and everyone. I wanna make a ton of Japanese friends and enjoy everything Japan has to offer. Also hope to deepen the bond between me and the girl through better communication. It’s not easy but wanikani has been a joy to work with, so I hope that day I can become more fluent is in sight.
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- Why You Started: My aunt, through marriage, is japanese, and so my cousin is half japanese. Growing up, I always heard about his visits there, and I saw the things he brought back, which peaked my interest in Japan’s culture at a young age. Now that I’m older and finished with college, I decided to finally pursue my interest and visit. However, I didn’t want to be completely lost when I visit, so I started learning Japanese.
- Why You Are Still Doing It: I really want to be able to speak with my aunt in japanese to surprise her someday. I know it seems like a simple goal, and its not the only reason. But, I really want to be able to do it. I’m still just as interested in and motivated to visit Japan, so I still want to be able to speak when I get there and not seem like just another tourist who doesn’t care about learning the language.
- Your Funniest Moment/Experience: I can’t think of an experience right now. However, I’m sure I’ve made plenty of embarrassing mistakes over the years.
- Your Most Memorable Moment/Experience: Again, I can’t really think of an experience at the moment. But, I guess one experience that isn’t that impressive, is that when I went to Disney world last year, I spoke to a Japanese lady in ‘Japan’ at Epcot, which was fun.
- External Help: I take a once a week class at the local college in my town, that is free. I also use some language exchange apps, though not as often as I should.
- Your Final Goal: To be fluent and able to speak with Japanese speakers without seeming like a goober. Also, to be able to read Japanese in order to better appreciate things that aren’t translated to English.
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I think your poll is missing private lessons. Arguably that could fold into classes, but I think it’s a bit different (for credit/not for credit). I also struggled because I used to take classes but am currently self study?
- Why You Started: Back in 2012, my favorite manga was slow with scanlations, so I wanted to be able to read it without having to rely and wait for translations. Global releases weren’t a thing yet too, so I wanted to be able to play video games as well. I only got as far as learning Hiragana and Katakana then though lol
- Why You Are Still Doing It: I went to Japan for a week last month, and I was amazed hearing people code switch! I don’t expect to actually reach that level but it revived my will to learn Japanese, just for the sake of learning/knowing another language and consume Japanese Twitter content haha
- Your Funniest Moment/Experience: None that I can think of at the moment
- Your Most Memorable Moment/Experience: With my super basic and toddler Japanese, I was able to understand and answer [simple] questions asked by Japanese locals when we went on said trip
- External Help: Just self-study
- Your Final Goal: Being able to read and listen to Japanese enough to get the gist of what was said, and be able to talk a little more to locals when I go back to Japan again
Yes, that’s how I would do it. Just choose Japanese classes. Arguably, my poll has a lot of flaws but it’ll be too complicated to cover all the possible cases so I just made something general.
As I said before, it’s just a fun project so I don’t need things to be 100% precise, all I want is an overview.
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- Why You Started: I’ve wanted to learn Japanese since about 2000. I’ve started with evening courses in the past but stopped going for no real reason. I’ve always wanted to learn a language and hiragana, katakana and kanji all look beautiful to me.
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Why Are You Still Doing It: I’ve only been self-studying this time around for a couple of months. I’m still super excited to see even minor progress. I just learnt my first four verbs
- Your Funniest Moment: When I tried to watch Friends on Netflix with Japanese audio. Didn’t understand one single word for 30 minutes.
- Your Most Memorable Moment: Like I said, I’m new to studying, but I felt very proud when I didn’t have to look up hiragana on a chart to be able to read simple words and sentences. I can also sprinkle just a few kanji into those basic sentences which makes me happy.
- External Help: I live in Australia and am self-studying. But I have used HelloTalk and the learn Japanese subreddit.
- Your Final Goal: Ideally, JLPT3. But I really just want to continue to improve and still be excited to continue to learn. If I can maintain the motivation to keep learning that’ll be good enough.
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- Why You Started: I kind of generally liked learning languages, there’s a fair amount of interesting books, manga, etc. in Japanese, and I wanted to continue learning a language even after not having any language classes in school anymore.
- Why You Still Are Doing It: Because I like learning languages, and I can at least kind of read many of the books I’m interested in now, which helps a lot with motivation(and just reading stuff helps to make sure I don’t forget much and maybe even learn something if I don’t have time for more explicit studying)
- Your Funniest Moment/Experience: I can’t think of any funny experiences. Guess I must be a pretty boring person.
- Your Most Memorable Moment/Experience: I guess there is that one time I kind of just wasn’t very into one of the book club books so I just decided to settle for reading it without looking anything up to get through it faster and… it turned out that I actually still understood enough to get most of it.
- External Help: None, aside from internet resources and the book clubs/wanikani forums in general
- Your Final Goal: I don’t really know. I’d like to be able to read pretty much anything I might be interested in without looking up much, but chances are I’ll just aim for something else once I’ve reached that goal(like, well, getting better at writing might be nice, and then there’s speaking and stuff too…)
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