Hi guys. I’ve actually been around a couple months now and am nearing the end of season 2–I guess I skipped out on introducing myself here at first because I wasn’t yet sure if I’d be sticking around.

As with many, my initial interest in the Japanese language came from being a long-time fan of Japanese entertainment. Not needing to wait for gatekeepers to localize something (if ever) would be pretty great, and becoming a bit of a gatekeeper myself to help those in my current position would be pretty rewarding.

The more immediate catalyst that changed things from “that’d be neat” to “I should do something about this”, was frustration at dealing with text I couldn’t understand. That enjoyment of entertainment also means I’ve ended up making or contributing to databases and wikis about a few topics. I got totally fed up with trying to match up Japanese text with romaji with translations, and having no idea when I could be making some dumb error without running everything through Google Translate to double check. I bought some books to learn hiragana and katakana not originally intending to go farther, but a friend of mine who enjoys learning languages helped convince me it was something I wanted to do and wouldn’t be an impossible task–even if he himself is kind of wary of kanji. :)

Along with TextFugu I am also using WaniKani. I don’t have a proper language log, but I did start up a Twitter account specifically for making comments and dumb jokes about the Japanese language.