This message board desperately needs something. I place to shout out how much you love learning the language and how happy you are that you started.

I'll start.

"Learning Japanese is just incredible!! The language is so incredibly fascinating, and so distinct from my mother tongue (English), that everyday feels like an adventure. Who can forget the first time you wrote a kanji? saw kanji on your morning commute and go "Oh, I recognize that!!" The first sentence you could understand!! The constant reinforcement that you are getting better!? It's a total rush!! It completely redefines your reality and your view on other cultures."

Haha, sorry, but I just had to get it out.

Please feel free to add to the "discussion."

You can make sexy conversations with teh japanese womens

Commute? On my commute alls I seen was kittens.

slowly the kanji,
sink into this mind-ripple,
like snowflakes drifting down to the ground.
each one different, but similar
silent moments of frozen beauty, a clue ...
for this world, that there is another....

I remember times of happiness

Haha
I'll add- you can make the sexy conversations with the japanese men,

eeeew, you just ruined the thread.

I wonder what the gender ratio is on this site. Women seem to be naturally better at conversation but do not to study Japanese as much as men. I wonder if it is all about the posibility of romance and the fact Japanese men (generally) aren't thought of as attractive to Western women. We all know what most Western men think of Japanese women

I like how there's a certain "logic" to Japanese which is missing in the European languages.

snispilbor Wrote:I like how there's a certain "logic" to Japanese which is missing in the European languages.

The main logic on this forum seems to be something like "日本語が話せる" ==> "日本人彼女"

playadom Wrote:

snispilbor Wrote:I like how there's a certain "logic" to Japanese which is missing in the European languages.

The main logic on this forum seems to be something like "日本語が話せる" ==> "日本人彼女"

I like the way this playadom guy thinks

I was really saddened when I realized this, but it seems like most Japanese girls (including my GF) would much rather talk in English. English is sexy and exotic to them. I used to go up to Japanese girls and try talking to them in Japanese, but now that I'm on the other side of the coin, I see guys constantly trying to hit on my GF on Facebook in everything from ok-but-boring-japanese to embarrassingly-bad-romaji, and I see that for hitting on Japanese girls, English is better every time.

I'm serious when I say that saddens me. I've basically come to understand that further Japanese study is a pure luxury/hobby. I used to have thoughts like "Man, I'm not only having fun, I'm also acquiring a super-valuable skill", but now I realize that that just isn't the case unless I do something extreme like become a Japanese salaryman. It's kind of like losing an old friend.

I like the simplicity of sounds in japanese

I have also been told by Japanese girlfriends that I sound "cool" when I talk in English. I assume this means I do not sound cool talking in Japanese. If you live in Japan and want to meet girls, it helps alot to know Japanese though.
If you live outside Japan where there are alot of Japanese tourists then knowing Japanese helps get better jobs. Not enough to warrent the time involved in learning Japanese perhaps. You really have to enjoy it to become fluent. I feel like it requires all of my spare time and involves a tremendous sacrifice of my other pursuits. The enthusiasm cjswanson1355 has is a must.

Learning Japanese is a drag. I'd much rather just read a book.

In Japanese, of course.

~J

woodwojr Wrote:Learning Japanese is a drag. I'd much rather just read a book.

In Japanese, of course.

~J

So would the rest of us. If it were an option :/

It is!

bodhisamaya Wrote:

woodwojr Wrote:Learning Japanese is a drag. I'd much rather just read a book.

In Japanese, of course.

~J

So would the rest of us. If it were an option :/

I don't see how it's not.

In response to the original post:
YES.
VERY YES.

I'll be sitting there and thinking "wait, I could be reading Japanese Wikipedia... or gathering even MORE Japanese knowledge!" and jump back into tossing kanji into Anki. Japanese really is far better than most people give it credit for -- it's easy, fun, and it sounds so radical. Every time I try reading something or watching a show or whatever and I don't understand the majority of it... all it does is trigger a "Well, I'll be there eventually!!" and it just pumps me up even more since I'll never get there if I don't continue my SRS'ing.

Heck, what am I doing here?!?! I don't get better at Japanese by doing this! D:<

I'd rather play Video Games...

In Japanese of course.

You guys are much more advanced than me

When I read anything in Japanese, I have to have a dictionary next to me. I can not just relax and read without stopping every few seconds to look something up.

Personally I don't think learning Japanese is all that fun anymore. It was a ***** blast when I lived in Japan, every new thing you learned opened new doors. Currently, there's really no point. Sure, I can read more books in Japanese, watch movies and dramas in Japanese, play Japanese games.... but during my journey of learning Japanese, I've come to learn that it isn't all that. Japanese TV is overrated. It's wacky, but their comedians are actually pretty weak. 90% of the anime released is just... BS. The top dramas are really good, but the overall quality of Japanese shows doesn't really come close to the quality of American shows in general.

Basically, I don't have even close to the motivation I used to have. I'm mainly learning more because I'm already good at it, would be a huge waste to forget it and not get really good at it. Frankly though, I doubt I will use it that much in the future. I want to work in Japan some, but having seen their salarymen first hand, I know for a fact that I will never ever want to work there permanently.

I guess the main thing is: I already have a girlfriend who I speak Japanese with. I don't have the main motivation driving everyone else.

EDIT: I've also gotten so used to Japanese, I've been decent at it for pretty long. Learning a new word in Japanese feels like learning a new word in English... it's nice and useful, but it's just another out of thousands. Japanese doesn't sound wacky and cool anymore, it's just... Japanese. I guess the main perpetrator is me learning basic Mandarin. Chinese is just... mindblowing. It's so radically different and sounds amazing. I still have that lovely "double your skill every day" feeling in it. Learning a single mandarin word makes me tons better at the language.

bodhisamaya Wrote:You guys are much more advanced than me

When I read anything in Japanese, I have to have a dictionary next to me. I can not just relax and read without stopping every few seconds to look something up.

It's actually a skill you train. Getting good enough to be perfectly comfortable to read without a dictionary just like that takes several years. You need to force yourself, eventually you get used to it and it becomes enjoyable. There's tons of people on this forum who are way below my level of Japanese yet read more than me because they are more used to it and enjoy it more. It's pretty mindboggling how you can enjoy something even when you only understand 70-80% of it.

Eh, I wouldn't say it takes years; it does, however, take the right choice of books. I personally thank Arms for this, as a fair bit of it is stuff that was of the right level for me, and the rest was so obviously not of the right level (big long compounds for military terminology, for example) that I learned to just get the sense of it and move on.

~J

Tobberoth Wrote:I guess the main thing is: I already have a girlfriend who I speak Japanese with. I don't have the main motivation driving everyone else.

haha... not all of us have that motivation.

Girlfriends can be a crutch after a while though. It happened to me when speaking Vietnamese. I got really good at talking to/flirting with girls, then I found that I couldn't talk to guys at all. That's probably not the case with you, but it can happen.

I know exactly the disenchanted feeling that you have with Japanese. I'm the same with Vietnamese; the movies, tv shows, music, comedy, literature, news, blogs (uggh); in a word; lame. Just finding a book worth reading (that's not a translation) is nearly impossible. The only thing that's still fun for me is learning new vocabulary straight from the dictionary, of which I don't have a whole lot left. I have a creeping feeling that I'll get jaded studying Japanese as well, but I'm still having fun absorbing everything at this point.