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After reading missongno15′s and マーク・ウェーバー’s posts in the Study Thread, I got interested in hearing how others here got started out down the path of Japanese language learning. As for myself, my story is perhaps not as interesting to read, but I’ll share it anyway.
It was late 2009 and I had recently started a year of internship teaching in a high school near Grand Rapids, Michigan. The internship was the last step to state certification and as the school year progressed, my colleagues in the certification program had their eyes set on a full teaching position. Although I enjoyed my internship, it was a lot of work. I knew that once I accepted a full teaching position it would mean that the majority of my time would be devoted to my job, at least if I wanted to be any good at it. I wasn’t ready for that yet, wasn’t ready to commit myself for the foreseeable future to one job in one location. (I don’t see teaching as a job where you can move around a lot, changing from one district to another even if there are enough empty positions available to facilitate it.) So while my peers had there sights on the job market, I had mine on the hunt for other opportunities that would both allow me to gain some experience related to teaching and be relatively short-lived.
While talking to my friend about it one night over some McDonald’s and two 40′s of Mickey’s malt liquor (a typical Wednesday), he reminded me that a mutual friend of ours from college who had majored in Japanese was living in Japan and teaching English. At first I disregarded it as I didn’t know Japanese and thought I stood no chance but, on a whim one night later that week, I decided to look into it just out of curiosity. When I read the description of the JET program, I knew I found something promising: teaching experience somewhere new and exciting, a chance to immerse myself in a foreign culture, no language requirement and an expiration date. The applications were due in less than two weeks so I quickly threw together all the application materials, had some letters of recommendation written and overnighted it on the last possible day.
I was called into an interview in Chicago. I took the train in with a friend and went to a bar to loosen up a bit beforehand. “Who Want’s to be a Millionaire” was on TV and the host, whose name I’ve forgotten had very noticeable wet spots under her arms. Off to the interview.I’m usually not an incredibly confident person but I thought I nailed that thing. I had heard terrible things about the interviews but mine was entirely pleasant. I took the train home in the morning and soon after decided it might be worth my while (since I felt sure I was going) to learn at least some of the language. After a few days of aimless youtubing, I stumbled upon Koichi’s videos. He was offering a discounted lifetime membership for his up and coming online textbook. I signed up and took his advice signing up for what was then called smart.fm which I used to learn the hiragana. It took me a while since, as I said, I was very busy with work. (And when I say busy, I mean, in actual fact, if I wasn’t sleeping, buying food, cooking, eating, cleaning, driving or in the shower, I was working, with the exception of Wednesday nights.)
By the time I had learned hiragana and had just gotten started on katakana, I heard back from JET that I was an alternate and would probably not be going to Japan. I gave up on the idea (It honestly was not that big of a deal to me since I had decided to apply pretty much on a whim.) and decided to apply to graduate school, take out a few more loans and substitute teach when I had time. I got accepted to school (master’s program in curriculum design with a content specialization in physics), found a long-term sub position (a math teacher that was going to be out on maternity leave)and a place to live (an old house with heavy mushroom using death-metal band). That summer I got a call from JET saying that a position had opened up if I still wanted it but I had to decide by the end of the week and be ready to leave in two more. Classes were dropped, the job given up, the lease canceled and in less than a month I was on a plane to Japan.
By this time I had forgotten the little Japanese I knew and when I met my supervisor, I couldn’t speak a word. I got here in August but didn’t really get around to studying seriously until December. I bought a text book (“Japanese Demystified”) and sat down with my neighbor and set off learning.
It started out of necessity, I had become frustrated with illiteracy, but it’s more than that now. Learning has taken on an intrinsic value. Even though, I’ll be moving back to the States soon, I’m studying more than ever.
It’s actually a little strange looking back. Although my learning technically started with Textfugu, I’ve actually done very little, almost none, of my learning on this site.
Anyway, how about YOU?
(Also, I’m not about to reread that for mistakes. Sorry for any that may be there.)
That’s quite a tale!
And for me…when I was a young kid I got the idea into my head that learning a language would be the coolest thing ever. I was also interested in all things European, so I was tossing up between German, French or Italian.
So I went to the parents and told them I want to go learn a language, and they said “Great! Would you like to learn Chinese or Japanese?”. Their logic being living in Australia & Asia being the future etc etc, it’d be better for my future to learn an Asian language.So, I didn’t feel I could back out on this learning a language thing I’d shown so much enthusiasm for, yet had no enthusiasm for an Asian language. Reluctantly I picked Japanese.
I went along and hated it, it was a chore. Yet despite doing pretty well at it I couldn’t wait to get out of it, so I gave it up.
Years passed and I slowly got interested in and really sucked into Japanese culture – “damn I shouldn’t have given that up, Japan is cool!”.
I finally planned to go to Japan for a holiday, and learnt as much ‘survival’ Japanese as I could in a short time. I was absolutely packing myself about speaking it and surviving on it.
Yet, when I got there I was surprised that I was able to get by without resorting to English and a lot of pointing. So, upon returning home after having experienced Japanese and got some enthusiasm from my successes I thought, yeah, I should get back into Japanese and learn it properly.So here I am.
Since I only told quite briefly about my own story, here is the full one. (by the way I think these are pretty fun to read)
At the start of my summer vacation last year, I was really bored. I was really in to gaming, and mostly MMOs(hardcore PvP 25h+ a week) together with my guild. But after joining RIFT, and figuring that it was a massive fail, we decided to quit, and wait for a new and better MMO. We were looking at games like SWTOR, GW2 and TERA, and initially couldn’t decide on a good one. Since TERA was already released in Korea, some of my guild mates bought a Korean account, to try the game. I joined them, and we played a game where we understood absolutely none. Pretty fun stuff actually, though as some people might know Korean MMOs are a bit of a grind… After having played TERA and thinking that maybe this was the next thing, I did not have much to do aside from stalking our forums.
On our forums we had this thread:
http://www.votf-online.net/index.php?/topic/716-anime-watchers-unite/
Since I did like TERA and it was Korean, I though hey, maybe I could check this thread out, and see what is going on. At first I couldn’t really understand how some people could have spent over 1 month of their life only watching anime, but since I hadn’t watched any myself I thought that it was wrong to judge. So I asked for advice on something to watch, which ended up in me watching the entire Death Note in 2 days… Of course my guild mates were very hardcore anime fans, just take a look at their watch lists, 6000 episodes watch, I mean how the? I thought this behavior was the norm among anime fans, so I just went ahead and took their advice.
After sort of joining the anime cult of my guild, I started to speak to them about anime.
look at the 5th page of the forum to see me announce:
Watched my first anime series, does that make me part of the club? xD
After this, one of my Danish guild members convinced me to watch a series called Clannad(lol just look at page 6).
Anyway, I watched all 48 episodes in 2 days, and omg was it the saddest thing I have ever watched 0.o After watching this series, it was clear to me that I liked anime, and I continued watching a bunch of series.
This is how it ended:
http://myanimelist.net/animelist/wtfhax
At some point in the middle of all this anime watching and boredom, I decided to look in to Japanese culture. I think this was triggered by not understanding some aspects of anime, and me wanting to know what was going on, but I can’t remember. It all lead to me searching info about Japanese culture for 2-4 days, where I did nothing else. I can’t understand how I could read so many Wikipedia articles a day, but I do remember it as being very interesting. This also led to my discovery of Danny Choo, where I also read a lot of posts. In an article, he linked to the article about how he discovered Japan, and how he learned Japanese etc.. After reading this, it was sort of stuck in my head, that maybe I should just learn Japanese. I couldn’t decide if it was worth the effort, so I decided to not just do it until I knew I wanted to stick to it. To determine this, I went ahead and started searching even more info about Japanese culture. After a few weeks of serious consideration if I wanted to commit my time to learn a language, I thought that hey, why the heck not? So I found TextFugu, did the initial trial things, and then did some insanely slow progress. I then realized, that nothing good would happen if I continued to stay together with all the no-lifers in my guild(including me :b) , and I thought that maybe if I spent the time learning a language instead of playing games, I could benefit from it. So I went ahead and quit my guild, even though I had a lot of fun with all the members
After this I pretty much started my career in learning Japanese. I think it is pretty fun that the thread from my old guild is public, so I can still view it ^^ It serves as a log from my initial interest in Japanese :P Looking through the entire thread was hilarious for me, and I think I will have to go back and watch clannad again.
Sorry if it is long, but this is the full story. (sorry for mistakes, this is too long for me to bother re-reading)-
This reply was modified 12 years, 7 months ago by
マーク・ウェーバー.
I don’t remember how I became interested in Japanese culture. I just remember always liking it as a child and being so interested in it. Then a long time ago, because my family traveled a lot, I convinced them to take us to Japan.
We stayed in Asakusa Japan, really close to the market.
Long story short, best experience of my life, more than I expected, made me love Japanese culture even more. So then I started to learn Japanese.
I plan to study abroad in Japan for my senior year, maybe graduate early to go. I want to find a career in Japan too.
(I could do a lot of details, but I didn’t want to write a novel XD)
Edit: I’m pretty sure it was a lot to do with video games and when I was able to use the internet freely it just interested me more from such a young age, I don’t remember specificly.-
This reply was modified 12 years, 7 months ago by
Noah.
Wow, some interesting stories. I know we all must have a tall tale to tell that could give some insight (on a number of things I am sure, but take from it what you will)
In my case, if I look back far enough, my first encounter with Japanese culture was learning origami in grade 4 of elementary school. That started my brief interest in the country and allowed me to take note of its existence at such a young age.
After that though, it laid dormant in the background until grade 8 or 9 when I was introduced to “Akira” the anime movie by my friend. After that began a fascination with the language and culture. I bought a rudimentary book on grammar and read it casually. At that point I decided that one day I wanted to visit Japan.
I didn’t commit to it seriously, but when I entered University, I saw an opportunity to take a Japanese class (even though my major was computer science) I applied to get it as a credit towards my degree. Eventually I was granted permission but a teacher was not found and the class was pulled from that semester. After that, I focused my talents on programming.
Finally after I graduated, I reconnected with my brother who had shared my passion for Japan on some level. In January of 2009 we decided to go for it. We would apply together and move to Japan together to teach English. At that time I was a freelance programmer.
We applied to several private Eikaiwas and I moved in with my brother who was living in Toronto at the time, so I could attend the interviews easier. After that we went in for the interview and we both rocked it. They gave us the opportunity to choose what city we wanted to live in, but we just asked for the first available area with two openings near each other because we wanted to live in the same area.
Less than a month later, they had an offer for us in Sapporo. We arrived in Japan in August of 2009. My brother stayed here for his 1 year contract and decided to return to Canada. However I continue to live in Japan and my current contract has been extended until spring 2013 (with the possibility to extend further).
I still haven’t made up my mind on whether or not I could live here for the rest of my life. I do love Japan, but the hardest part is being away from your friends and family.
The greatest thing I could have EVER asked for was sharing this experience with my brother. I never felt home sick and my brother (being my best friend) got to share in the most meaningful experience of my life.
sorry for the long post. it’s hard to summarize the past 3 years, let alone something that started in grade 4..
Just copied and pasted. This is the one without the bells and whistles so to speak, so if you want all that, go here: http://www.textfugu.com/bb/topic/the-study-thread/page/36/#post-29657
It all started on November 2009, during the beginning semester of my junior year in high school. At that time, I was slowing getting lax in my work, and at that time started watching lots of anime to pass the time. Those anime consisted of largely of mainstream stuff like Code Geass, Naruto (though I still do watch it), Lucky Star , TMOSH, Ouran High School Host Club etc. By the way, this does not mean I was obsessed with anime – just like how many people like to leisurely watch anime, or dramas, it was a pretty awesome way to pass time. One fateful night (yes I choose to use such words because it seems like fate to me), I opened up Youtube and typed in the search bar “seifuku”, because if y’all have ever watched Lucky Star, you know the opening theme for that anime.. I expected to see search results about Lucky Star, but there it was, the video that was first on the search results, and the video that lured my curiosity that morphed into the missingno15 you all know today.
This is that same video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_1ObyG2-1YMy curiosity got the best of me so I decided to have a watch. The song is subbed so I clearly can tell what this song is about. Rather than freaking out like the average person, I thought it was pretty interesting given the topic it was about or seemed to portray, not to mention the song was really good. I mean REALLY good. The more I listened to it, the more I started to love it – it was nothing like anything that I’ve listened to before. I mean, it was Japanese music, but it wasn’t clearly anime music and it definitely was not Western music. The fact that there was so many girls in one group didn’t faze me either. It got me more excited knowing just how much novelty there was in the idea of it. Just about everything a “normal” person would do, I did the opposite lol.
Then here comes the part that most people expect to come first. After the nth time watching and listening to the video, there was a girl that caught my eye. It was the girl who was shown for a second at 2:38. She was mad cute and I JUST HAD TO KNOW WHO SHE WAS. Looking back at it now, I can probably name just about every single member in that video and I know who she is now, but at the time, there was just too many to properly fit a name to a face. It also didn’t help that they got seconds of screen time. I knew that if I just watched more of their songs and videos, helpful Youtube comments would help point me the direction to who was who. Through this process, I became more exposed to their videos and songs, liking pretty much every song that came my way.
(Btw, if you want to know what those songs were, they were 会いたかった、軽蔑していた愛情, スカートひらり、Baby!Baby!Baby!, 夕日を見ているか, 大声ダイヤモンド, 涙サプライズ！, １０年桜, 言い訳Maybe, RIVER….you get the idea, basically every single until November 2009 when I discovered them).
It’s probably also important to note that this all happened in one night and over the course of a few days so naturally, I didn’t know who anyone was so the main thing that really pulled me was their songs. It really pisses me off sometimes when people assume that the reason why I got into AKB is because I’m just some male teenager with hormones on MAX. Reasonable assumption though, I’m not gonna lie, some are cute, some are sexy, but not what pulled me into this fandom. Hell, my Japanese 先生 used me as an example on her powerpoint slide to review the grammar point 「んじゃないかと思う」 assuming the same thing. → ケンさんはＡＫＢのコンサートに行ったので、女の子が好きなんじゃないかと思います Here we can obviously see it was in jest, but I’ve met some people who just couldn’t fathom the fact that it was music first, then girls.
After what seemed like an exhaustive comparison between videos, I finally discovered who the girl was. Her name was Itano Tomomi.
“Wait a minute, that doesn’t seem like the girl at 2:38″
Thats because she isn’t lol. The camera work was so fast and the members had seconds of screen time so in the process, yes, I confused Minegishi Minami for Itano Tomomi and this is why she is my oshimen. Sorry Miichan lol. This discovery led me to wanting to know more about her so I did google searches on her which led me to one of the AKB48 forums – Stage48. There I found a 62 page thread discussing her, and I was determined to find out who she was. So naturally, I did what anyone with no life would do: read around 60+ pages of a thread in 1 night lol. As of now, 4/18/2012, her thread has over 200+ so if you have no life and are willing to read through all of that, then by all means, go ahead lol.
After finding out who she was, I lurked around that forum for a month until my registration on 07 Jan 2010, 23:08, according to Stage48 (my username is honeysenpai btw, only on idol forums though). I read more into who these people are for that entire duration and one thing that caught my eye was people experiences meeting them. They known as “Idols you can meet”, and there were a couple of Stage48 members who shared their experiences seeing them in the AKB48 Theater in Don Quixote building at Akihabara. I read stories about having 2-shots with your favorite member (2shot just means having a picture with another person in which in the picture are 2 people. This isn’t only used in AKB, this is actually a Japanese term), paying money to have time to talk to your favorite member etc. I loved the idea of it, it made me want to go see them so much because I thought of Western celebrities and understood how you will never interact with them in the way that AKB allows fans with its members. These guys obviously were 外人、so they warned how it was a good idea to know some Japanese when you want to talk with them because as I remember it, “it would become an awkward smiling and staring contest”.
As you can imagine what you just read, wanting to go to meet these idols, it would probably be a good idea to know some Japanese. It was an idea at the time, but what solidified my resolve to do it seriously was this video right here. I realized that they were never going to learn English, so instead of waiting for them to magically learn English, I would learn Japanese instead.
Thank you Kobayashi Kana for being so horrible at English. If it wasn’t for you, I would have never began learning Japanese.
It was around this time too, when I found Koichi/Tofugu. Koichi seemed like a really chill guy and he was offering his newly created, Textfugu which he promised to make Japanese much much easier while providing constant updates being that it was an electronic textbook. I know why MisterM is always so angry all the time, it was because he wrote this on his manifesto and its what he proclaimed which probably what brought in many people. I was one of them and one of the first ones too lol. Its all g though, I learned to move on from Textfugu. Because I understood from the beginning that I have no idea when AKB will break up so for me, becoming fluent in Japanese is something that I just want needed to happen NOW and Koichi seemed to promise me these things so I bought Textfugu membership at around February 2010. Thus beginning my journey and never-ending quest to become fluent in Japanese.
What do I think of all this now? Well, that most of this nonsense started with AKB and I enjoy every minute of it. It also isn’t far to say that my life completely changed because of AKB. AKBは一生の恩人だ。Through AKB, I discovered my passion, what I really want to do in with my life、just like how Danny Choo discovered his passion when he saw Japanese video games and anime. It’s also pretty funny to me that my relationship with AKB has grown to this point, it’s a hell of a lot deeper than what people think at a superficial level, it’s been an awesome rollercoaster ride so far with so many new experiences and ways of thought. It’s what really exposed me to Japanese culture as opposed to anime which is the popular media item which gets people interested in Japan. My goal of meeting them one day hasn’t changed, though meeting any member now is near impossible now because they are the nation’s most popular idol group (at the time of this post). Now, not only do I want to meet them in person, I want to tell these members with my newly acquired ability that I toiled so hard for everyday, a thank you of a lifetime.
Thus concludes how I met AKB. Hopefully, you enjoyed reading this and wasn’t a waste of time for you. I have an irregular sleeping pattern now so the time I finished typing this all up is at around 5:30am lol.
Proper way to end this….IS WITH MORE AKB STUFFS BALHHHHHHHH
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV2po8XZWJs
Hatsune Miku got me into the Japanese language but Watanabe Mayu made me actually start learning.
It seems she is being featured as the center for the next single, how do you feel about this?
I think the first interest for me in japan was an exchange student in my senior year was from japan and graduated with us. I became interested after talking to her quite a bit. Unfortunately I had taken Spanish in High School junior and senior year for university qualifications (i say that, but let’s be honest, living in the US, spanish is definitely more useful…). I almost jumped ship in university and tried Japanese, but i couldn’t get past the fact that I’d have to take an uncredited course for changing from Spanish (that didn’t stop me from taking ancient greek, oddly enough, for a humanities credit). I also kind of wanted to learn Italian, but i was become disillusioned with latin based languages. I never felt like i was able to learn them well enough to speak/listen with any confidence, even after 2yrs of univ. spanish. Then there’s the problem of familiarity with Latin based languages for english speakers. English borrows a lot from most European languages. After having gotten into anime in university (i’d seen a little in HS but that was the early 90s and i grew up rural, so we had very little access back then..only thing i remember watching much of was akira), I became more and more convinced i’d like to learn japanese. I find myself picking up things a lot better in it, but this is also the age of the internet now and I have far more access to materials in the native languages than ever before.
Wonder if I should post mine? I guess I will anyway.
What got me interested was a not very interesting reason, and a long and very boring story.
I had been interested in Japan as a kid (a lot of kids in the 90′s were, what with anime becoming popular and whatnot). I watched a few of the old anime standbys and played Pokémon (still do) like any good youngster of the 90′s. And then I just kinda lost interest.
For the next few years Japan was just another country to me. I didn’t care about it any more than I cared about any other country. In later years I was very happy to hate on “weeaboos” and carelessly make fun of Japan and any part of its culture. It’s something I’m really not proud of.
More years went on and I grew up. I’ll take this moment to mention that I’m not originally from the U.S., which is where I’m living now. I honestly never felt 100% “synced” to this culture. Not to say it’s bad, just that I could never make myself “fit in”. For most of my life I ignored it, but the older I got, the more I started to notice a need to leave.
It got worse and worse until eventually it just became a source of depression. I felt like a perpetual “visitor” despite having lived here for several years. I felt like someone without a home. My life then took a turn towards finding a place that I would claim as “my home” and build my life the way I wanted to, in a place that I would enjoy living in.
My first choice was to go back to Europe. I started with Russia, even began learning the language. Eventually I realised that it wasn’t the place for me either. Then I set my sights on Germany. Again, I began studying that language, and again, it just wasn’t working for me. Nothing gave me that feeling of joy, or that drive to move forward. Nothing flipped the switch that said “THAT’S GONNA BE MY HOME”.
And then, embarrassingly enough, it was my old friend anime that kinda gave me the hint. As I said before, I had begun to hate anime. Part of this was simply because I just didn’t want to be labelled a “weeaboo”. So I kinda began watching it sporadically, almost like it was a guilty pleasure. I honestly felt bad about doing it, like a kid smoking his first fag and trying to hide it from his parents.
Eventually I saw the Lucky Star theme song on YouTube. And I wanted to watch it. I seriously felt terrible about it, but I did it anyway. Insta-hooked. After that, I decided to be honest with myself and just kinda said “well, I guess I like anime again…” and that was that. I didn’t think anything of it and continued watching my cartoons.
Eventually I started to look into Japanese culture a bit (mostly to understand some of the jokes in the show) and it became an eye-opening experience. I felt a real happiness delving deeper into the country’s true side. And strangely, I felt a bizarre “familiarness” with it, like I was already in tune with a lot of the customs and cultural idiosyncrasies and a general sense of “yeah, I get this”.
This was the first time I ever felt like this, the feeling of really wanting to be a part of something. I could relate 100% to Danny Choo because I can honestly say that we felt the exact same thing. I NEEDED this. This was where I wanted to build my career, my family, my whole life. This is the path I wanted my story to take. Everything about the little daily-life aspects about Japan people take for granted made me feel a warmth inside. Simple little stupid things, like looking at Yahoo Auctions in Japanese, seeing a “made in Japan” label on a product, watching videos of people driving Japan’s streets. Its music, its food, its blocks of flats, its trains, its road signs, its bloody TOASTERS for God’s sake. ALL of it made me feel like I was looking at home, and that I could never be 100% happy without it.
So I made my choice. I was going to go to Japan, and never come back. I would build my life there from scratch, become a citizen, and when I’m done, I’ll lay my bones to rest in its soil. And having decided this, I figured that I had better learn the language, and thus I got started studying Japanese. And for the very first time in my whole life, I finally had a real dream.
It has been a true roller coaster ride since then. With lots of ups and plenty of downs. As a heavily depressive person and a natural pessimist, I’ve had many moments where I really could not see this dream ever becoming a reality. I’m actually living one of those moments now. My studies have long since ground to a halt and I’m doubting the validity of this goal of mine.
But for some reason, something in me won’t allow me to let it go. Something keeps me holding on to a little string. Though I stopped studying, I still can’t stop myself looking at YouTube videos, or listening to podcasts, or watching 漫才 comedians. I don’t know where I’ll go from here, honestly, but one thing I’ll always be sure of, is that I’ll never, ever be truly happy without it.
Frankly, I hate telling this story, because everyone always assumes that because Japan is such a “trendy” country, that I’m just a rosy-glasses-wearing weeaboo (especially when I bring up the role anime played in all in this). Like Missingno, that assumption really kinda pisses me off. But I don’t care any more, people can think what they want. I know what emotions and feelings brought me to this dream, and I don’t have to justify it for anyone. I would say that Japan has saved my life. I say that with full honesty, and in all seriousness. It’s not something I like sharing, but I’ll just say that I was feeling so bad that I was very close to ending it all, were it not for Japan inspiring me into believing that some things are worth living for.
I just hope that I can muster the strength to pick up where I left off and see this goal to its proper end.
This is the best thread ever.
It’s 5.40am over here… I think this thread is best left till tomorrow/today :P
I think I must be a bit older than most Textfugu users, but that gives me a slightly different story to tell. I first got interested in Japanese because of the military-issue language manuals my dad brought back from his service at Iwakuni during the Korean War. When I was about six I thought they were the most fascinating thing I’d ever seen.
At the age of nine, when my best friend was learning Elvish from the appendices to Lord Of The Rings, I thought learning Japanese would be a lot better, since I was pretty sure Japan actually existed.
When I was twelve, I started reading the translated novels my dad had on the bookshelf, including Yukio Mishima’s “The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea”. Definitely not one I would recommend as young-adult reading, but it sure as hell stuck with me, and everything I read made me even more curious about that strange country on the other side of the world. Back then, during the transition from dinosaurs to mammals, we didn’t know what anime was, but I was getting up at 5:30 every morning to watch Battle of the Planets; later came Voltron and Robotech.
At about 16, I became convinced I had no talent for languages (unlike my older brother, the German prodigy) but found I was really good at getting bad haircuts and thrashing around to loud music, so I lost a few years there, though I still watched every cartoon from Japan that made it to American tv.
So I’ve had a feeble stab at learning Japanese every five years or so ever since I was a tyke. It’s like a mysterious compulsion, and there’s usually a trigger. The last bout before this one was brought on by finding “Genji Days”, Edward Seidensticker’s diary of his years translating “The Tale of Genji” and living in Japan during the late 60′s-early 70′s. If you’re interested in the problems of translation in general, and Japanese in particular, I’d recommend it – it’ll also shatter any idea you might have about Seidensticker as a dry academic (dude got around).
This time, it’s manga. I’m a voracious reader, and a comics enthusiast, but I’d pretty much dismissed manga. “Sailor Moon” as a tv cartoon was a great reason to be late to work every day, but I didn’t think of reading it. I did subscribe to Mangajin during its brief existence, but I never got drawn in with the snippets it included.
Now I know better, and we’re getting better, more sophisticated manga in this country every year, but one trip to Kinokuniya in LA and I know I want to read it in the original. I also don’t want to depend on scanlators to provide me with access to the mountain of stuff deemed unsaleable in the US. And, yeah, someday I’d like to read Mishima, and Haruki Murakami, but manga seems a lot more accessible right now.
I’ve gotten further this time with Japanese than I’ve ever gotten before, finally fully learning the kana and getting at least some basic kanji down. I’ve also started believing I might actually learn to speak it too – and Textfugu’s been a big help, as well as Tofugu Enterprises’ ventures being generally mighty entertaining. ありがとうございます, Koichi & crew!-
This reply was modified 12 years, 7 months ago by
crowbark. Reason: damned tags!
I studied Japanese a bit when I was about 17 and really into anime. I gave up studying mostly because I found it so frustrating, but also because my obsession with anime faded. Once we reached college, I lost touch with most of the friends I watched anime with. I continued reading manga here and there, and always intended to one day learn enough Japanese to read a few volumes I had that were untranslated.
I assumed Japanese would stay on the list of “things I kind of want to learn, but will probably never get to” until last summer, when I was about to enter my last semester of grad school (AKA, the dreaded thesis semester of doom, because everything is more fun when “of doom” is added to it). I started watching a fair number of Asian dramas again, and enjoying those renewed the idea of maybe-possibly teaching English abroad. I’d though about it after getting my BA, but had ultimately chickened out. I looked into my options and decided I wanted to apply to the JET Program.
I started studying Japanese again at the end of last summer, and I was kind of surprised how much had stuck with me all those years later. I really enjoyed studying while finishing my thesis (which was somewhat grim creative nonfiction, as it was a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing). For all that my progress has been slow, working on something as stuctured as Remembering the Kanji is really kind of soothing (as I said, thesis was kind of grim).
To cut a rambling story shorter, I was rejected from the JET Program in February. I’ve continued studying because I like it and do want to get to the stage where I can read those volumes of untranslated manga I’ve had for a decade, as well as be able to research some of my art related interests without having to search for translations (I write a lot of nonfiction).
I may reapply to the JET Program in the fall, but I don’t know that my chances will be any better on round 2. I’m also considering applying to some of the other companies that place teachers in Japan, but I’ve heard the pay isn’t nearly as good and I will still have expenses in the US. So in the fall, I’ll be applying to teach abroad as well as to teaching programs where I currently live.
Anonymous“マーク・ウェーバー”
Mark, you play NA Tera? I do, my username on Valley of Titans. Only reason I’m playing is to drop heads in open world.
Fkn pvp is so good.
inb4 irrelevant post
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This reply was modified 12 years, 7 months ago by
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