その人たちを嫌くなった。
I think that studying Japanese to the point that I've gotten it, as well as going to Japan for a while, has irreversibly changed how I feel about the whole language/country. It also has changed how I feel about the otaku here at home, which sounds painfully hypocritical since I used to be part of that crowd. In Nate's words, I know how sausage is made, and now I'm never in the mood for a weenie.
I think most people get into Japanese because there is an aspect of Japanese culture that they like, be it anime or manga or video games or traditional culture or anything. There are very very few people who begin studying Japanese because they like the language. I can't say that I count myself within that number, because I used to be really into anime and manga when I was younger. But I do maintain that, once I started learning the language, it came very naturally to me and I found myself wanting to learn to speak it to express myself, not to translate old Naruto episodes. Maybe that's why I lasted as long as I did, after all my friends moved out. I grew to truly appreciate the language, and for a time I reveled in finding the secret meanings concealed in certain Japanese sentences.
Then I went to Japan.
I'm still on the fence as to whether I liked being in Japan or not. I definitely had ups and downs, but I think that, overall, I'm glad I went and I would like to go back in the future. What's holding me back is a feeling that I'll see familiar places that I saw last time, and remember old friends, and I'll never be able to experience it anew. My visits will be seen through windows to the past. But it's something I'm working on. I think that when I went to Japan, I saw firsthand what the culture was really like, and I couldn't help but notice it was drastically different from all the anime and manga portrayals of Japanese everyday life. Granted, I don't believe that they really have giant robots housed underground in case of alien attack, or magical fairies that go to high school. But I found that people in anime talk a lot more than actual Japanese people do, and what they say is entirely different. This is why anyone who learns Japanese from manga or anime and then goes to Japan is always a failure. They never learn how to actually communicate. It would be like someone memorizing Shakespeare and then coming to present-day England (or even America) and trying to speak using Elizabethan prose. It's fine for art, but art only imitates life.
The worst part about it: now that I'm home, whenever anyone talks about Japan or Japanese language or culture around me, they almost always get it wrong, and I feel like a jerk for wanting to correct them. I can't just sit back and let them be mistaken or ignorant, I want them to be able to appreciate what they're talking about, so that they can talk about it with more authority.
Classic example: I've been reading the webcomic Dreamless, which takes place in California and in Japan at about the start of the American entrance into WWII. There's a scene where a Japanese boy, about 18 years old, is kidnapped by his friends and taken to a wooden building and left there. When he gets his blindfold off, he sees a girl dressed in a kimono with a white painted face. The comments for the comic all explode, "Oh! His friends got him a geisha! Sexy!"
...
This one is particularly bad, because you don't have to have studied Japanese to know how erroneous this is. Anyone who read/saw Memoirs of a Geisha knows that you can't just go out and GET a geisha. They come to you. That's what separates geisha from prostitutes. I would have thought, since the person writing the webcomic has put so much effort into making the dates correct so the story is historically accurate, as well as in the costumes and the language (though there is very VERY little Japanese in the comic), they would have at least seen the movie, if not done research so that their "geisha" character was convincing. She was definitely meant to be playing a geisha, because her obi was tied in the back as opposed to the front (the way prostitutes are - I got this fact from reading Memoirs of a Geisha!), but there was no reason for her to be a geisha.
Later on their was a picture of her playing a shamisen (extra point for the artist, they drew her using the correct instrument), and then there are comments about her being called the "Onsen Geisha." I didn't see a hot spring, nor a bath house, nor any body of water. How did she get the name "Onsen"?
So yeah, Japanese makes me devolve into one of those Internet trolls who sit around mashing their keyboards about how people are stupid. I'm just glad I have the self-control not to shout down everyone on the comment board about factual errors, or to buy everyone in charge of any anime-themed webcomic ever their own copies of Nakama 1 & 2.
I think most people get into Japanese because there is an aspect of Japanese culture that they like, be it anime or manga or video games or traditional culture or anything. There are very very few people who begin studying Japanese because they like the language. I can't say that I count myself within that number, because I used to be really into anime and manga when I was younger. But I do maintain that, once I started learning the language, it came very naturally to me and I found myself wanting to learn to speak it to express myself, not to translate old Naruto episodes. Maybe that's why I lasted as long as I did, after all my friends moved out. I grew to truly appreciate the language, and for a time I reveled in finding the secret meanings concealed in certain Japanese sentences.
Then I went to Japan.
I'm still on the fence as to whether I liked being in Japan or not. I definitely had ups and downs, but I think that, overall, I'm glad I went and I would like to go back in the future. What's holding me back is a feeling that I'll see familiar places that I saw last time, and remember old friends, and I'll never be able to experience it anew. My visits will be seen through windows to the past. But it's something I'm working on. I think that when I went to Japan, I saw firsthand what the culture was really like, and I couldn't help but notice it was drastically different from all the anime and manga portrayals of Japanese everyday life. Granted, I don't believe that they really have giant robots housed underground in case of alien attack, or magical fairies that go to high school. But I found that people in anime talk a lot more than actual Japanese people do, and what they say is entirely different. This is why anyone who learns Japanese from manga or anime and then goes to Japan is always a failure. They never learn how to actually communicate. It would be like someone memorizing Shakespeare and then coming to present-day England (or even America) and trying to speak using Elizabethan prose. It's fine for art, but art only imitates life.
The worst part about it: now that I'm home, whenever anyone talks about Japan or Japanese language or culture around me, they almost always get it wrong, and I feel like a jerk for wanting to correct them. I can't just sit back and let them be mistaken or ignorant, I want them to be able to appreciate what they're talking about, so that they can talk about it with more authority.
Classic example: I've been reading the webcomic Dreamless, which takes place in California and in Japan at about the start of the American entrance into WWII. There's a scene where a Japanese boy, about 18 years old, is kidnapped by his friends and taken to a wooden building and left there. When he gets his blindfold off, he sees a girl dressed in a kimono with a white painted face. The comments for the comic all explode, "Oh! His friends got him a geisha! Sexy!"
...
This one is particularly bad, because you don't have to have studied Japanese to know how erroneous this is. Anyone who read/saw Memoirs of a Geisha knows that you can't just go out and GET a geisha. They come to you. That's what separates geisha from prostitutes. I would have thought, since the person writing the webcomic has put so much effort into making the dates correct so the story is historically accurate, as well as in the costumes and the language (though there is very VERY little Japanese in the comic), they would have at least seen the movie, if not done research so that their "geisha" character was convincing. She was definitely meant to be playing a geisha, because her obi was tied in the back as opposed to the front (the way prostitutes are - I got this fact from reading Memoirs of a Geisha!), but there was no reason for her to be a geisha.
Later on their was a picture of her playing a shamisen (extra point for the artist, they drew her using the correct instrument), and then there are comments about her being called the "Onsen Geisha." I didn't see a hot spring, nor a bath house, nor any body of water. How did she get the name "Onsen"?
So yeah, Japanese makes me devolve into one of those Internet trolls who sit around mashing their keyboards about how people are stupid. I'm just glad I have the self-control not to shout down everyone on the comment board about factual errors, or to buy everyone in charge of any anime-themed webcomic ever their own copies of Nakama 1 & 2.