Early progress developed into a passion

I bought a book about Japanese and started learning. While learning Hiragana and Katakana (the two forms of the Japanese alphabet) I noticed that it wasn't particulary hard, it only was difficult when trying to apply the concept of western languages to it. Fortunately I had dabbled with Latin, so the shock of meeting a language with a completely different grammatical structure was already dealt with.

Quick, early progress developed into a passion and I went to work in my efforts to learn a new language. My goal was to feel as much at home speaking in Japanese, as I feel in German or English.

To add some audio to my textbooks I started watching Animes (Japanese animation) with subtitles. I'm not the biggest Anime fan, it's just a medium of art for me. Some Anime products are good, some are not, but it's definitely the easiest way to get in touch with actual spoken Japanese. But while watching Animes with the intent of studying the language it became obvious to me that this alone wouldn't work and I needed the support of a teacher. Luckily I knew where to start and got into contact with a few sites dedicated to learning Japanese (there are a lot of those). On one of these sites I met the administrator which led to me finding Verbalplanet, as a friend of his is a teacher here.

Quick Facts: Japanese

Japanese is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. There are a number of proposed relationships with other languages, but none of them has gained unanimous acceptance. Japanese is an agglutinative language. It is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned in conversation.

Unlike most western languages, the Japanese language has an extensive grammatical system to express politeness and formality. The Japanese language is distinguished by verb forms and vocabulary which indicate the relative status of the speaker and listener, reflecting the hierarchical nature of Japanese society. There are two forms of the Japanese language considered standard, Hyojungo or "standard Japanese", and Kyotsugo or "the common language", though many of the distinctions between the two have blurred. Hyojungo, or standard Japanese can be subdivided into Bungo or "literary language" and Kogo or "oral language".