Thread of True Honesty

To tell you the truth, my interest in the Japanese language sparked with the sound of the language. How it started for me is that I saw it in 8th grade on a course list for high school classes and I chose it, thinking it was something I never really heard. So, I looked up Japanese stuff and began looking into their culture and literature on the internet with my Chinese friend, who was somewhat familiar with the JP language. After actually hearing it and looking into it, I decided it was something I wanted to learn.

I will say, however, that after I started taking classes in high school for Japanese, there were some students who got me into looking for Japanese video games and anime, but I quickly grew extremely sick of that with the mass amounts of real weaboos that there were in the classes who were only goofing off and causing the teacher extreme amounts of stress.

I never got into it for anything but the language itself and I grew fond of the culture. I only care for real life Japanese things, in all honesty. I couldn't care less about anime, manga and video games.

That's cool. Although I never considered learning Japanese, there were a few things that made me appreciate Japan. For instance, this website: http://www.pilot.co.jp/.

Personally, I find Animes a terrible reason to learn Japanese so I have some bias in that regard. There's a lot of interesting things about Japan and I would also like to visit there sometime. My dad always takes wonderful pictures whenever he goes to Japan for a business trip ;]

Most people who take up the language just for anime tend to give up when they realize the language structure is opposite of English. It's a hard language. If you're only into it so you can watch anime without subs, chances are you won't have nearly enough motivation.

That's pretty bad. Someone else told me a story of their Japanese class basically being "sit down and watch anime while the teacher just sits lazily" class. The teacher would let them bring in their own stuff to watch. Every experience I hear about seems to indicate that a majority of Japanese classes in highschool are crap. College as well, but less than highschool. I've always just been self study, so I've never had to deal with this stuff.

Learning any new language is difficult. I actually find their alphabet harder than the Kanji characters. When I took French in High School, it was pretty challenging. I find actively speaking a language is the best way to learn, but I suppose that's kind of hard if you are just focusing on listening. I love foreign language classes a lot though... they're very enjoyable having taken French and Mandarin (although that's kind of cheating :x)

In my High School, the Japanese teacher was a Caucasian. I went to his classroom once and it's so saturated with Animes it's sickening... although I heard that the teacher speaks Japanese very well and teaches well.