CreepyAF Wrote:I was recently creeping the I study Nihongo because... thread. It seems like many of us started because we're either manga/anime otaku, in a relationship with a Japanese person, or we did it on a whim and continue because of the sunk cost fallacy.
Assuming your Japanese is at a level where you can put it to use in real world situations (or at least try to), have you found the time and effort to be worth the result?
Presumably you feel the experience has been worth something if you're still on the path to flueny/higher fluency. But if you could go back in time and tell your past self to put their time and energy into anything but learning Japanese, would you?
Well, you're going to get a lot of survivor bias in this poll - presumably the people who felt it wasn't worth it won't be reading this.
To be honest, I'd say yes and no. I did JET because I wanted to have the experience of living abroad after college, and JET was by far the best program I had access to. I spoke intermediate Spanish at the time, but most of the spanish-speaking opportunities I saw were volunteer, and I really wanted a job.
Learning Japanese while on JET was ... interesting. Certainly most JETs I saw didn't learn anything beyond rudimentary Japanese. And they might have had a better time both on JET and in Japan because of it. I experienced incredible resistance to me speaking Japanese with Japanese people both when I lived in Japan, and even now in America. People would regularly speak to me in broken English even when it was clear the conversation would go smoother in Japanese, and I specifically asked them to speak in Japanese. Many people flat out refused to speak to me in Japanese, ever. This still happens to me, and I still don't like it. In that sense, if my "live abroad after college" experience had been in another country, learning another language, I might have greater overall satisfaction with this part of my life.
I genuinely enjoy speaking a foreign language, and the moments when I do something new with the language - a particularly long or interesting conversation, for example - I genuinely treasure. I'm nowhere near fluent. But every time that I get closer to my goals of talking about aspects of the Japanese experience I find interesting (e.g. traditional culture, foreign affairs, issues of race and ethnicity), I experience genuine happiness. So that's nice.
A major downside is that there aren't many Japanese people in my demographic where I live in the US (30s, professional). Most of the people I get to meet here are students studying abroad or au pairs. I hear that there are visa issues which make it hard for Japanese to move here for other reasons. Presumably if I moved to Japan I could solve that problem. But I think that my life overall is much better living here in the US.
The "experiment" I'm currently running is whether I can use my Japanese language ability professionally somehow, on my own terms. Last year I gave a talk on one of my projects, in Japanese, at a conference in Tokyo. It was well received, which was nice. I think that it would be fun to do something similar again.
It's just a realization that it's likely I will end up spending as much time learning the language as actually using it since I don't plan on moving to Japan.
