I’m back to TextFugu after taking a bit of a break. I signed up during last summer and made a good amount of progress but I fell off the wagon when the school year started again. Now that I’m finally done with school (submitted my last undergraduate essay last night), I figure now’s the right time to get back into things.

My main motivation for wanting to learn Japanese is that I’m a huge Macross fan. I first started watching it back when Cartoon Network aired it as Robotech, then later on I discovered the original show. Macross is a pretty popular series on the whole but because of licencing restrictions, most of the content related to the show doesn’t get an English release. So I want to be able to read all of the various background information such as tech books, magazine articles and manga spinoffs without having to wait years for translations. There’s also the fact that Macross is heavily focused on music so it would be nice to be able to understand the words to the various songs.

In addition to Macross I watch a lot of other anime and read a lot of manga so I figure learning the language would help with that as well. My secondary goal for learning is that I would like to go to Japan some day and experience the culture, and I’d like to be able to carry n conversations, read signs etc. before I do that.

I didn’t introduce myself last time but since I’m getting back into it again I want to stack the odds in my favour and I figure participating on the forums will give me extra motivation. I also plan to take things a lot more slowly than I did last time, as I think I kind of rushed through the material.

Looking forward to learning with you all!

-Sean