Reasons to learn a language
When I started learning Japanese, like others anime is what initially drew me into learning the language. Although watching an anime dubbed or with English subtitles was alright, watching a show through its original medium felt like the definitive way to watch.
This initial idea fueled the start of my journey, hopeful that I could watch without subtitles someday. Now having studied Japanese for a few years, I feel like this motivation has completely disappeared. Instead, new reasons have popped up that I would’ve never predicted.
Travel
My progress wasn’t the fastest early on due to not studying consistently, but after starting to study more consistently I wanted to try and use the language more in real-life scenarios. At that time I had the opportunity to travel solo overseas, and heard Japan was a great destination for solo travel.
The trip was a great experience, and although brief gave me insights into how a completely different culture operates. From that trip I started to have an interest in more areas of the culture outside of anime, which became an increasing motivation overtime the more I studied.
Literature
In the past I wasn’t the most avid reader, but once I bought a Kindle Paperwhite, that changed completely. The convenience of being able to bring it anywhere combined with the ability to load thousands of books onto something the size of the notebook changed how I perceived reading a book. With a growing interest in Japanese culture, I decided to read Kokoro by Natsume Souseki in English. Although the book was written in the early 1900s, it gave me an appreciation for Japanese literature, and sparked my motivation to read books in Japanese.
At this stage I was still around JLPT N4 level (lower intermediate), so I was still a long ways off from being able to read books like this in Japanese, but it gave me a reason to stay consistent, knowing that with each new word learnt I would get closer to achieving this goal.
Enjoying the process
Unintentionally I’ve found enjoyment in just learning a language, and all the idiosyncrasies that come with it.
When I first started learning Japanese, I thought that kanji was a complete waste of time — “why can’t we just use hiragana and katakana? or even simpler romaji”. Although the English alphabet may be easier in this regard, there are many interesting subtleties that arise from using kanji as an alphabet.
As one progressively learns more kanji, unlike English, the meaning of new words becomes easier to understand.
For example, take the word 加熱 (kanetsu), which roughly translates to the application of heat. Let’s assume we know what each kanji roughly means already:
- 加: addition
- 熱: heat
Based on these two kanji, we can derive the definition of the word!
Conclusion
No matter where you are on your language learning journey, I hope this post gave you some insights on why to learn a language. This is however just my personal reasons I’ve discovered overtime while learning Japanese, and reasons to learn a language are ultimately unique to each person’s circumstances.