After tackling the Hiragana e-book and finding it useful, intuitive and fun I decided to join up as a full member to continue learning on a more serious level.

My reason for wanting to learn Japanese is 2-fold. First, I took Latin as my language in high school. A dead language is literally the most useless language you could ever learn. So now, many years later, I had begun wishing that I knew another language besides English, that people actually speak. But I was never able to settle on which one to choose.

So why choose Japanese? Well, several years ago my brother became fluent in Japanese and went to Japan to teach English. While there, he fell in love with a Japanese lady there and they are getting married this year, which means he’ll be in the country for good now. So as our family has extended its borders, we have a bunch of people to practice speaking with – a major motivator in language learning!

We visited them in Japan last year and found that the biggest language obstacle was not being able to read signs and train maps. Outside of the major cities there was NO english subtext. And they don’t live in a big city so this was an issue. Also, before going I had done some learning of the usual conversation-based travel books and knew a few phrases, but they really didn’t go very far at all with the future in-laws. So I’m basically here because I want to be able to read simple signage in Japan and be able to communicate with our new in-laws.