# tell me about learning Japanese **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [April 2, 2011, 8:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-learning-japanese/576969 "2011-04-02T20:30:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Mississippienne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d2c977/32.png) [@Mississippienne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mississippienne)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2011, 4:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-learning-japanese/576969/61 "2011-04-06T04:19:30Z")
Oh wow, I can’t believe someone actually got indignant over that Japanese essay! As for ‘linguistic altruism’, okay, let’s be honest here, you can live your entire life as a monolingual English-speaking American with little or no difficulty. You can dump the two semesters worth of Spanish or French you had to study in college from your brain as soon as you graduate, and skip merrily through your life without major problems knowing only English. It is not neccesary to your average American’s life to know a second language fluently. If you’re the sort of person who WOULD, for whatever personal reason, want to learn another language, it makes little difference whether you study a popular, ‘useful’ one, a more-or-less dead language like Latin, or something more exotic and rare like Basque or Occitan. I mean, other than maybe helping out a tourist with directions once or twice in your life and visiting a foreign nation once or twice, those years spent studying Portuguese or whatever are never gonna ‘pay off’ unless you manage to get a job in a foreign country or marry a non-native English speaker. I don’t think it’s any sort of cultural appropriation or any more or less useful to learn something like Coptic so you can listen to its hymns and read saint’s lives than studying Kanji for 3 and a half years so you read manga. ---
**Author:** ![Onomatopoeia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/onomatopoeia/32/4145_2.png) [@Onomatopoeia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Onomatopoeia)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2011, 5:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-learning-japanese/576969/62 "2011-04-06T05:08:54Z")
> [@Mississippienne](#): > > Oh wow, I can’t believe someone actually got indignant over that Japanese essay!. I did take that a little too seriously, didn’t I? I blame it on bad pizza. Yeah, that’s it. ---
**Author:** ![Autolycus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/22d042/32.png) [@Autolycus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Autolycus)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2011, 7:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-learning-japanese/576969/63 "2011-04-06T07:08:17Z")
> [@PSXer](#): > > but I don’t like anime. I wish I could just like what I like without everyone else telling me what I should watch Watch whatever the hell you want. I was just asking how you know you don’t like it if you’ve apparently never watched anything more than Pokemon. It’s like saying you don’t like Italian food if all you’ve ever eaten is Olive Garden. On top of that, the reason you won’t watch any has nothing to do with whether you actually like it or not. However, you are right that a large number of Japanese language learners go through a weaboo phase, as it seems that’s what you were implying with your ‘glorious Nippon’ crack. Nippon by the way is not a word I’d expect somebody to know who hasn’t studied the language or watched more than a bit of anime…Just saying. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_Torque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e9bcb4/32.png) [@Max\_Torque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_Torque)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2011, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-learning-japanese/576969/64 "2011-04-06T14:42:15Z")
> [@Sunspace](#): > > _Saluton! Ĉu vi volas lerni Esperanton?_Hi! Do you want to learn Esperanto?I actually started learning Esperanto because it was supposed to be easier than other languages, I really wanted to learn _something_, and I hadn’t learned enough French to matter. What I discovered was that having one language at some level of fluency made it easier to learn another. I can now do much better at French than I ever could before. And as I mentioned in [this thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=368675), I’d been interested in Japanese for a long time. So when I took the Japanese immersion lessons, I was ecstatic to discover that I was actually picking it up faster than I’d ever picked up a language before. But learning _one_ other language, _any_ other language, makes it easier to pick up a third. I am actually passingly interested in Esperanto; I read an article on its history a couple of weeks ago, which caused me to look up some websites and learn a handful of words. It does look simple enough, no irregular verbs or silent letters, and only a handful of grammatical rules. The downside appears to be the odd diacritical letters, which I’ll have to get used to. Still, it’s gotta be easier than kanji. ---
**Author:** ![PSXer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/48db29/32.png) [@PSXer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PSXer)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2011, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-learning-japanese/576969/65 "2011-04-06T18:09:20Z")
Yes I have never watched anime and still claim not to like it. I don’t like trying new things. I am happy watching the things I already watch, and there is no reason I have to try new things. Don’t even know where I learned Nippon probably from one of the other message boards I go to where there are more weeaboo [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-learning-japanese/576969.md?page=3)