Why should I learn Japanese?

Ultimately, the only reason you should try to learn Japanese is because you want to. That is to say that you have to want to learn Japanese, which is not the same as simply wanting to be able to speak or read it.

In particular, I warn anyone planning to learn Japanese solely to understand untranslated anime and manga. I don’t mean that it’s a bad thing to want to do, but bear in mind that it’ll take you years of study before you know enough to actually translate anything. Best to get something else to motivate you in the meantime.

Learning a language to any reasonable degree of fluency will take a lot of time and effort. You need some motivation to put in that time and effort or it’s not going to happen.

There are lots of reasons to want to learn Japanese, from the promise of a job being harassed by foreign schoolchildren to simply liking the sound of the language. They can be as trivial and silly as you like; the important thing is that they encourage you to study.

As stated above, the desire to understand untranslated anime & manga is not a good goal when learning a language, but that doesn’t mean it’s not beneficial. RobM outlines his experiences.

I started Japanese lessons because I thought it’d be cool - a 2-year stint of anime addiction had me at a point where I could understand many common phrases. I’d sometimes feel smug when I noticed a non-literal translation.I enrolled on the Warwick leisure course and made the mistake of getting the Kana textbook (which was written entirely in Kana, so I had to look up each phonograph in the back before I could pronounce it’s syllable). Because of this I learnt to read Hirigana (and to a certain extent Katakana) quite quickly - the two phonetic character-sets - which is great for impressing friends.Ultimately the leisure course taught me a lot of the grammer and general form of the language, and this did help me understand more of my beloved anime, but not as much as you’d think. For instance I’d recognise questions in dialog by a trailing “ka”, which is effectivly like reading out a “?” in English.I did not continue the course, and now - a year later - the only things I remember are how to count to about 10,000 and that the Japanese don’t have any swear words, or really anyway of being rude to each other, except to be sarcastically polite.So my advice is to seriously consider your reasons for wanting to learn Japanese, and then - more importantly - commit yourself fully if you decide to learn. I didn’t give my lessons any time outside of the scheduled teaching, and suffered because of this.