Hello TextFugo members :3
My name is Nico, I’m now 18 years old and come from Berlin, Germany.

And since i hate short introductions… (half story of my life –> lots of text incoming^^)

As far as I can remember I’ve always had a love for Japan.
My very first contact with something Japanese was probably the SNES :3 I myself can’t really remember anything about it, but according to my parents I always loved to play on it^^ So for me, Nintendo became the first “thing” to get me excited whenever I hear something has got to do with Japan. On a side note, the SNES also made me a gamer in very early years of my life. There was,is and will be never anything which could ever make me stop playing console games since then :3

Besides gaming, especially the TV program did a lot for me when it comes to Japan. Game shows like Takeshi’s Castle (sadly with so much content cut :( ) and of course Anime were watched daily after school^^

Back to the games. By now we had a N64 at home, but it was time to get the next generation. Nintendo? Microsoft? Sony?
Microsoft was the first to get kicked out of the decision pretty fast :P For my father an me the hard part was to decide between Nintendo and Sony^^ In the end it became a PS2 for our household and looking back at it, that was the right decision :D There were many great games from developers all over the world, but there is one which really cut into my life:

Final Fantasy X

I was probably to young to fully understand the whole plot, but little missed details didn’t matter. It was the greatest game I’ve ever played until then and it’s still one of my most favorite games of all time. That game showed me that (J-)RPGs are one the greatest genre out there^^ I didn’t count how many times I played through it, but I can say, that I will beat it again in the future for sure :3

By that time, it was already clear for me to someday learn the language myself, so I could visit the land of my dreams sometime in the future^^

Anyways, as time went by, nothing really happened to my interest in Japan. I liked what Japan brought us, but a long time there was nothing “new” for me which really kicked in. That was until I discovered Let’s Plays a few years ago. And soon afterwards I found out about the Touhou Project :3 The games and the huge story behind the world and all of its characters are just awesome, but what really caught me was the music. The originals and all these great bands doing there own versions of these great themes, so awesome^^

I think Touhou was the last bit to get me completely into my “\o/ Woohoo, Japan!! \o/”-mood or whatever you would call that and further solidified my dream of being able to understand all that great stuff I see and hear all the time now^^

Since these were the most important things, I’m trying to shorten the rest a bit ;P
From then to now I became more interested in Japanese stuff besides games, Anime and music like e.g. culture and history, but to be honest, my main interest lays still on the entertainment section ;)

Sadly Anime faded away in free TV, so I’m glad to have found the option of watching them online… with the original voices \o/ Better than any dub, since I love the sound of the Japanese language.

Oh man, seems I forgot something there ;) I myself don’t know much about languages. All I can say is, that I think:
- German is quite a nice language
- English is great, especially to get along in the world^^
- Japanese sounds thousands of times better than every other language I’ve ever heard. I can’t really say what it is, but directly compared to Japanese, every other language sounds like crap to me xD

With growing interest in J-music I also decided to give Vocaloid another chance (after some songs I heard, early in my time of getting to know Touhou, made me hate the software so much)… Lucky me, nowadays there’s no day without hearing at least one Vocaloid song for me^^

OK, last thing (and finally TextFugu related^^):
I worked my way through chapter one around two months ago. But since I wanted to get my final exams for school done and especially wanted to buy me access myself instead of asking my parents, I decided to delay learning Japanese a little bit. Starting from today, I can finally begin refreshing knowledge from chapter one and this time go on without anymore delays :D