For those of you who know me in my real life you know that for the past few years I've had a strange obsession with the idea of learning Japanese. However I never really did care too much for the process or whatever of learning it. I don't particularly care for anime (not that I hate it please don't kill me) and I'm not super into video game history to the point that I need to be able to read Japanese because the only documentation of a game or company is in Japanese. Then why have I been on and off about Japanese for as long as I have? I'm not too too sure but I have a theory.
I've taught myself everything I care about. Coding, HTML, Unity, even a lil bit of parkour back in middle school to high school and I've never struggled to pick something like that up. In the end these things are learned through doing and they're easy to do. Do you gotta math class you can't be fucked to do the homework for? Make a calculator during your class that does all the work for you! Gotta couple moments to kill during recess and a big ass wall? Wall run and go crazy. Long road trip to a hockey game? Remake a mobile game on your laptop in Unity. Tired of social media but need a safe place to store you're thoughts that you wish to share with your friends? Make a website on Neocities. With the exception of parkour I can do all these things by myself and see an immediate result. The feeling I'd get when a program worked in the way I wanted it to, or when I could reach hard to reach places that others couldn't all drive me to continue doing said thing. It's fun to be good at something. Really fun. I got hooked on Overwatch because I could feel myself improving after each game, and whenever I hit a clip or did something fun I felt like all the time I put into playing the game was worth it.
That being said with Japanese any attempts I've made over the past years have felt disjointed and disconnected from any gained experience. During each period of study where I would "finally dedicate myself to learning the Japanese language" I would learn a lot! I know every katakana and hiragana by heart to the point where I can follow along to karaoke. I know some grammar rules and basic sentence structures, and I definitely know way more about the Japanese language than the average American. However for someone who's wanted to learn the language and has made steps to learn the language I've made very little progress. I think part of the reason for this is because I didn't have a reason to learn. Like I've said before whenever I learned something in C# or Unity I could then use that knowledge to build something and engage with that skill, and when I was working on projects in Unity or C# I could find in practice what I do and don't know and reinforce those principles. However in Japanese when I finish the text book lesson or the review video, that's it, I'm done. I don't have anything I would want to do that Japanese my most recent Japanese lesson would allow me to do or practice. At least nothing I wanted to do.
There was one guy I met in a VRchat world who said to me "to give yourself the courage to learn something like a language, you gotta first understand why you want to learn that language." I toss those words around in my brain from time to time when I consider my past with Japanese. I've always had some kind of draw towards it, and I don't really understand why. In the beginning it may have just been one of those things you say you want to do or be as a kid without really understanding why. Same reason for a while there I wanted to be a rock star which I very quickly realized was not for me. However unlike my "dreams" of living it up as a rock star on the stage and performing for my droves of adoring fans, Japanese never seemed to leave me. I always found a reason to want to learn it, but it was less of a reason and more of a question to an answer if that makes sense. For a time it was because I was watching anime thanks to the Undertale mind virus that would see me consume all the anime I possibly could (shout out "Kotoura-san" and "Yuki Yuna is a Hero".) Then I stopped caring for anime and then the reason became "to just be better lol" I had and to an extent still have this complex of needing to be better than other people (shout out dad) and I just kinda rolled that into it, all "well everyone says they wanna learn Japanese but they don't, if I do it though that proves I'm better than them." Now however I don't really have that reason, thankfully I've grown up, not enough to ditch that complex but enough to see that it's stupid (shout out therapy). Now however I finally decided to do some soul searching, and try to find meaning for my want.
I want to learn Japanese because I want to learn languages. I want to prove to myself that I can do something if I put my mind to it. The reason it's never left me is because I can't give up that easily. I just need to do it. So All this riff raff is to say that I'm going to start a Japanese journal. I expect it to be small now, maybe a sentence a day, but hopefully by making it public It'll give me that small push I need to stick to it. That being said you can find the link to it here