Should You Learn Japanese?

Hi everyone! Hope all has been well! I've been busy, but wanted to put this op-ed before the new year. When it comes nearer to the end of the year, people start to ask themselves what their New Year’s resolution will be. For some, it may come in the form of spending more time w/ those you hold dear, for others it might be about improving themselves, such as being more studious, and in some cases- learning Japanese. 

There’s been a healthy debate for and against learning Japanese, which I’d like to bring to light. Now, I often hear people say (joking or not) that they want to learn Japanese, either to be able to understand the dialogue, have their own dirty secret for learning a language, or to interact w/ their favorite actress.

For most people, learning Japanese is pointless, because the fact of the matter is, unless you live in Japan- there’s not going to be a good reason for you to need to speak it. But, that alone shouldn’t deter you. It just means that learning the language will be much harder without being able to fully immerse yourself, and it’ll be very easy to forget without practicing. 

Now, if we talk about the use of Japanese related to AV- I’d also argue it’s pointless most of the time. The titles for AV are extremely long and detailed, to the point where it may as well be a summary. Thus, it becomes easy to interpret what’s going on in the movie even if you don’t understand anything- something which some people have taken advantage of.

 On top of that, if you want to be “in the know” for JAV news, all you have to do is load up Twitter and have a handy auto-translator (built in for those that allow translations) and you’ll generally get a decent gist of whatever is said. You could even use OCR (optical character recognition) and put it into something like DeepL if someone has typed out what they wanted to post on their notes in successive screenshots. 

Despite this, there are some things that can’t be assumed, such as interviews, or weirder dialogues. Even if you use something like a machine auto-subtitler to write out what’s being said in Japanese before translating it into Chinese (something common for all subs that are put out quickly, and on mass scale) and into English, there’ll still be huge inaccuracies. This is where the value of sites like ZENRA come into play, which will offer subtitles w/ the QA. 

So should you learn Japanese? The answer is very simple- probably not. But, if you do plan on visiting Japan, AND plan on meeting an actress at a fan event, I would highly recommend it as they’ll be surprised and more inclined to remember you. If you think you’ll regret not being able to understand something in the future, then you should learn Japanese. If you have no attachments to learning the language, then don’t.

For those wondering what they should learn:

If your primary purpose is for JAV and the Actress events, I recommend taking a look at our JAV glossary, and studying traditionally (via whatever textbooks/resources you want *not DuoLingo*) w/ the goal of being able to answer the following questions in Japanese.
*Note- I won’t list these questions in Japanese, as there’s many ways to ask this. 

• Where are you from?/ Any basic questions about yourself
• How/Where did you find out about me?
• Any questions you will want to ask the actress (*note- not all events will allow you to ask questions just based on time factors)

List of potential resources-

• Genki
• WaniKani 
• TaeKim's Grammar Guide (FREE)
• Minna no Nihongo
• Jisho.org (Free dictionary)
• TanoshiiJapanese (Free dictionary + other stuff)

Hope you all have a great New Year!