Hi! My name is Mathias. I’ve been reading Tofugu.com for some years and when I saw the TextFugu offer, I thought what the hell – can’t be too bad. ^_^
I’m from Germany and in school we only learned English and Russian, but Japanese wasn’t offered. And since in my tiny village of 1000 people there was coincidently no Japanese teacher I was kind of forced to teach myself. :’-) With limited success, so far.

I utilized some of the possibilities the internet offered me, like japanese pen pals and japanese learning websites. Of course I also got myself some books. But somehow it was hard to stay motivated and other things got in the way.

Now I’m slowly approaching the end of my university studies and turned 24, but still can’t properly speak and understand Japanese. Probably also forgot most of which I learned earlier. But of course with each new year come New Year’s resolutions. Mine is finally learning Japanese properly.

My motiviation is that I want to travel Japan some day (haven’t been there so far) and also just being able to understand Japanese. Some of my favourite video games and movies are Japanese. Not having to switch to English or German would be awesome, for starters. Also there’s kind of an invisible wall between the English speaking internet and the Japanese one. I’d like to take a peek over that wall, which requires being able to read and understand the texts. :o) Of course, ultimately it would be great if I could actually talk to Japanese folks. ^^

So I hope textfugu and its community will help me a bit along the way of reaching these goals eventually.