*Languages: Japanese, Korean
*Spoken in Japan, N/S Korea
* This piece is part of the NSLI-Y Alumni Insights virtual event.
A middle school anime phase is so common, it almost seems universal. My friends and I followed the same trend, the novelty of the bizarre characters and surreal storylines gripping our attention—for a short time. For my friends, it was another phase to enter and exit quickly.
For me, not so much.
That phase—beginning in middle school and spilling over into high school—was the catalyst for my linguistic endeavors and what led me to where I am now: intermediate proficiency in Japanese and Korean.
To give you a bit more unsolicited context, my interest in anime was first piqued by a series called Naruto, which might be best summed up as a coming of age story about ninjas. I then fell down the proverbial rabbit hole and found myself binging countless hours of anime and reading loads of translated manga.
It wasn’t long before I became exposed to the term weeb, a slang word referring to people obsessed with Japan to a cringe-worthy extent. The word has taken several forms over the years—beginning as wapanese, evolving into weeaboo, and eventually shortened to weeb—but the critical connotation has always been the same, and it’s used liberally to describe anyone with even the slightest interest in Japan.
It seems that at that point in my life, I was unfazed by the negative stereotype of weebs and disregarded it almost entirely. In the seventh grade, I began studying Japanese with the simple-minded goal of comprehending the pop culture I consumed in its most raw form—without the aid of subtitles or translation.
And so, I began teaching myself through a mish-mash of online resources, ranging from self-study textbooks and language exchange forums to podcasts and the anime that I already watched in excess. I had the luxury of time and was able to completely throw myself into the language—falling in love with its sound and syntax, and its maddeningly complex yet beautiful writing system.
My enthusiasm for the language would extend beyond Japanese pop culture as I found myself more interested simply in the act of studying it. By the time I entered high school, I was able to skip my way to Japanese IV, and I’ve most recently passed the N2, the second highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.
But even since becoming more serious about language-learning than in my middle school days, I’ve continued to feel a lingering unease in explaining my hobby to others.
The longer I continued to study Japanese, the more I began to cringe at my cause for beginning it, and it wasn’t because of a newfound hatred for anime or anything like that. Rather, I was afraid of seeming obsessive to some and one-dimensional to others who might think pop culture was a dumb motivation to pursue a language.
I think every language-learner is barraged with a line of questions each time someone learns of their multilingualism.
What made you start studying (insert language)?
How do you study (insert language)?
Why do you like (insert language)?
Time after time, I found myself unable to respond confidently to these questions and began to downplay my interest in pop culture around people I didn’t know well.
The year I entered high school, I began teaching myself Korean as well in a similar chain of pop culture-related events. If I hadn’t been apprehensive about explaining my initial reason for studying languages before, I sure was now. I braced myself to be met with a new label: koreaboo.
Anime and manga? Korean dramas and K-pop? I felt like the very interests that had led me to my passion had the depth of a kiddie pool, and it became difficult to talk about them uninhibitedly.
I am someone whose love for the Korean language led her to study abroad in South Korea to look beyond the surface level, and someone who constantly makes an effort to connect in real life with speakers of Korean and Japanese. And despite all of that, I still had an irrational fear that someone would call me out for fetishizing East Asian culture or having a shallow understanding of it.
Only recently have I begun to re-examine the embarrassment I’ve felt in explaining to people how I began my linguistic journey, and I’ve concluded that it isn’t justified. An interest in a country’s pop culture by no means equates to fetishization and can easily be a healthy form of cultural appreciation.
Every time I hesitated to tell people why I learned languages, it was because I was searching for a valid reason that would satisfy people’s curiosity.
But there is no such thing as a valid reason.
This may all be an isolated concern in the mind of an over-dramatic teenager with a wariness towards labels. But on the off chance that someone like me has questioned the validity of their motivation to learn a language, I’m telling you that it doesn’t matter. Tongue-twisters with my host parents, a friendship with the bilingual local hot-dog shop owner, and long-lasting, meaningful relationships. It took precious moments like these in my journey to fluency and quite a bit of time to realize it, but it truly doesn’t matter.
At the end of the day, any reason is acceptable, so long as you are genuine in your interest and respect for the culture.
I may never fully escape the titles of weeb and koreaboo, but I love languages a little too much to let that matter.
About the Writer:
Hi there! My name's Shreya, and I've been teaching myself Korean and Japanese for a few years now. I hope to speak a lot more languages in the future, but the next ones on my list are French and Hindi.
Shreya is a junior currently attending Plano West Senior High School in Plano, Texas. She is a NSLI-Y Korean Summer 2018 Alumna, and also is the 2019 Southwest Region Alumni Representative for the NSLI-Y Alumni Association.
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