I usually prefer more mature stories and thus mangaka like Naoki Urasawa, Osamu Tezuka, and Jiro Taniguchi. So many that my girlfriend complained that she couldn’t buy as much for herself as she wanted to because my books already were too heavy and maxed out our allowed weight. I once learned English through watching movies with (English) subtitles, so I thought “why shouldn’t the reading-route work with Japanese too.” On my trip to Tokyo, I bought a big bunch of books and manga. It was within the last year when I discovered my love for Japanese comics and naturally it became my goal to read manga in their original language: Japanese. I already read some manga back then (only by Naoki Urasawa) but I was more into western comics. That was the reason why I started in the first place. I always loved Japanese films and the Japanese culture itself but I wanted to be able to read Japanese books and maybe play a video game in Japanese. That wasn’t quite the case for me when I started to learn Japanese. Many people want to learn a new language for the primary reason to speak it in their specific country. I soon realized that there is a reason why Japanese people sometimes say that they wouldn’t properly understand (grammatically!) their language themselves.Īnd because Japanese people do love manga, they made a great comic out of it: 日本人の知らない日本語 (Japanese people take Japanese for granted). I even took some private Japanese classes but that wasn’t that helpful. That was motivation enough to keep me studying daily. Now I had a good reason to start learning again and knew that even the slightest knowledge of the language would come in very handy on my visit in February 2013. But this all changed when I booked my flight to Toyko last October (2012).
It became just too frustrating and was more like an everyday burden than fun. I had my ups and downs and even took a break from studying for a couple of months last year. I’ve been trying to learn Japanese for about one and a half years now.