Hello to all! (unless you’re not here, which statistically is most people)

I just signed up here. I’ve been doing the free season while waiting for payday to roll around and I’ve finally made it without starving to death and/or performing unspeakable things for money. <- note, when I get tired my sense of humor becomes evil. But I am kind to your sensibilities, and there will be a tl;dr version at the bottom for people who can’t be bothered to stick with my inanity (read: inane, not insane, you speedy readers). Honestly I wouldn’t blame you.

Which leads me to an additional warning of future posts from me – I like to write. A lot. So much that I end sentences with prepositions ON PURPOSE. Much like my anti-hero J.R.R. Tolkien, (he’s my anti-hero because I want to hate him but his work is SO important) I basically write to read my own writing. But sometimes I put in a joke to prevent the words from drying out like whatever the opposite of drowning is.

SO!

To follow the instructions I was given, why am I learning Japanese? A small handful of reasons. If reasons were tangible things, and generally small enough to fit in one’s hand. There are several assumptions about the physical properties that we’d have to make, but that isn’t what we’re here for.

The first is that I’ve always loved languages, but never been stimulated enough by the ones I’ve tried learning. Growing up in Canada, and specifically the capital (which shares a lot of essential services with our French neighbors across the river, meaning we’re like 60/40 English and French here), I’ve been exposed to French my whole life. I can’t really speak it, but I can make sense of it when I hear it and read it. I can also swear and I have a really convincing French accent. Priorities, y’know. I had tried learning Italian a while back, and though I absolutely adore the language, it just wasn’t challenging. I was progressing through it too quickly and I was starting to lose interest. So I said to myself “self, you should check out languages that don’t use the same character set as English”, to which other me replied “hey, solid idea!” to which first self replied “what’s wrong with me?” Moving on. While I was not at all actively pursuing this task I’d set for myself, I accidentally discovered J-Pop, which I’m sure will be REAL embarrassing when/if I go to Japan. After spending some time listening to it, I ended up watching some Morning Musume interviews and actually paid close attention to the language. I thought it was just such a great sound. Like sometimes I’ll be sitting around studying and going “why am I doing this again?” and I just have to listen to someone speak Japanese. It all comes back. It’s such a beautifully complex and utterly bonkers language – and it works my brain. Hard.

Second driving factor came to numbers. I’ve already commented on Eihiko’s intro about having made the same joke as he, but I neglected to mention that I also ran the numbers as he did. Admittedly, I did this after the fact, which sort of just makes it confirmation bias, but I checked out numbers on languages. It’s hard to get concrete numbers on the second language speakers, because some people pick up a language and never get counted, and some people “speak the language” because they passed a class but actually just freeze and weep pathetically when confronted with someone who tries to speak that language at them. So I looked exclusively at native speakers. Well, in Canada, the population is about 35 million. Even if we ALL spoke French (which, surprise, we don’t), that’s still a FRACTION of the total number of people in Japan. By the numbers, if I learned Japanese, I could move to Japan and talk to more people than I could by learning French and staying here. “But Justin!” you might be saying, “A LOT of people speak French across the globe!” And gold star for you, Mr. or Mrs. Particular! However, French has a lot of local dialects that are completely incompatible with Parisian French. I’ve seen Quebecois try to speak to Parisians and they just can’t. And this likely goes for the cool Creole French and African French as well. I know, it’s a ridiculous reason. It’s not even a reason, it’s more like a factoid that I can vomit defensively at people when I get to the desperate end of my argument about why I’m doing this. But I really love the idea that this small group of islands makes up the 8th most natively spoken language in the world. That’s what’s appealing to me, I guess. Not numbers, so much as it is numbers over kilometers squared.

Thirdly, I think I may want to be a teacher. I’m currently waiting on the results of an application to begin being a volunteer teacher’s assistant. That way I’ll have a better sense if it’s something I want to do. If that goes well, I’m not sure I’d want to teach in Canada. As it is, the job market here is pretty saturated unless you have a particular skill, like a mechanic’s license so you can teach auto tech in high school. I have none of those sorts of things. So it’s a step by step process, and having very seriously educated myself on Japanese culture, I think it would be a really good place to look if I decide teaching is for me. After I get that sorted out I will travel to Japan to see if I actually like the lifestyle there, and if THAT goes well, I will expand my investigations into getting myself hired and moved there. Maybe only for a year, maybe more. But that kind of decision is quite a way’s out.

I figure, the worst thing that can happen is I’ll learn a language, keep my brain from prematurely atrophying, and when I go to Teriyaki Experience I can order the hell out of some noodle dishes. And that doesn’t sound so bad to me.

Other than that, there isn’t much to say about me, personally. I’m here to learn Japanese, like (I’m guessing) the rest of you. If you are, for some bizarre reason, interested in my life outside of Japanese language studies, head over to my project of love at vwvortex, where you will find me – germanpettingzoo – quite active in the VW Fox section. Between Japanese studies, my car, work, and generally staying alive (ah, ah, ah, ah) that about covers all the things I do with my life.

**TL:DR Version**
I want to learn Japanese because it’s a complicated language and it will be more rewarding to me to learn something where I’m struggling and probably crying a little bit on the way there. And then some other reasons that aren’t real. And maybe that I’d like to teach in Japan. It took me the length of War and Peace to type that out.

If you made it down here the honest way, well, congratulations, but also my sincerest apologies. I really can’t give you back those moments of your life. I’m sorry, that’s just the way it is. I might have glasses like David Tennant, but I can’t go back in time.

Until next time, Fuguers, Fuguists, Textagonians, Textfugutarians, or TextonianFugunites (no seriously what do we call ourselves?), I wish you all the best of luck in your studies, and I promise future posts will be shorter than this one and less annoying.

Cheers,
Justin

P.S. I’m fairly sure I’d like to be called a TextonianFugunite.