Hi there. My name is Thomas, and I study Japanese with TextFugu just like you. I am a recent-enough university graduate, and I currently work as a web developer. But that’s not all I do! I studied music in college for a couple years and finally earned my undergraduate degree in anthropology. I’m… a mixed bag.

Telling you why I study Japanese, though, is more difficult. I admit that I like the more visible bits of Japanese popular culture, and I know that I enjoy learning languages—my German classes in college and my earlier Latin classes gave me some of my most favorite school time memories. German was specially fun. But I regret not being able to study that language more carefully. Why not study German, then?

Japanese has interested me since I was much younger. My dad once worked for a Japanese-owned company, Nippon Express, and he occasionally brought half-Japanese papers home from work. I found one at some point and marveled at the stuff I saw on the page. What sense could someone make of this? Childhood wonder kept me thinking about this for years as I came to know more and more snippets about Japan or about Japanese history. Recently I searched for a way to plunge into the language proper and have come here, to TextFugu. I’m not yet sure what I plan to do with my Japanese knowledge in the future, but I have come to think that I learning new stuff is my passion—it’s why I taught myself how to play the piano and how to build websites. Japanese is a deeper outlet for that habit of mine.

And I have to say that TextFugu is an excellent, excellent resource. Everything has its shortcomings, but TextFugu is one of the few language learning sources that has taken me seriously as a learner. My German classes in college, in contrast, seemed to leave large gaps or meander around concepts without answering the most critical question: why?