Japanese
In my personal opinion, the most interesting
aspect of Japan, I must say, is the Japanese language. I have always been
fascinated by the ethereal sophistication the Japanese language possesses, as I
consider it to be steep in subtle intricacies. The study of language is
something I would like to make my living out of, naturally because I major in
language teaching, specifically ELT. By far, Japanese is the only language I
have studied, or rather, am studying, that is in opposite to the English
language. Personally speaking, I think that English is a highly extravagant
language due to its sheer size, whereas Japanese, though quite flamboyant
itself, is somewhat like a morsel of creamy matcha mousse that melts in your
mouth with a subtle, pleasant aftertaste.
Nowadays, many yearn to learn the
Japanese language. This is immensely an influence of watching Japanese anime. I
really liked watching anime because the artistic style is uniquely different
from animation from other parts of the world. I personally call animation from other
countries “cartoons”, but animation from Japan is exclusively called “anime”.
Anime is world-renowned and is enjoyed by peoples, young and old, all over the
globe. I, myself, admit that anime was the reason why I wanted to learn
Japanese in the first place. Thanks to anime, I garnered enough intrinsic motivation
to start learning the language, which was neither an easy task nor a truly
difficult one, to say the least.
Initially, learning Japanese was a
superficial endeavour of which, I thought, was to merely be able to comprehend Japanese
anime easier without reading the subtitles; however, as I continued learning
Japanese, I suddenly realised that there was more to the language than just
anime. I started becoming fascinated by the system of the language itself and
the underlying principles that bound individual constituents of the language,
i.e. the syntax. Being a linguist in the making, I was intrigued by the
linguistic features of the language. With this, I also was exposed to the
semantics and pragmatics of the language, which gave me a vague schemata of the
culture of Japanese society. Before I realised it, I fell in love with the
Japanese language, Japanese culture; I fell in love with Japan. After years of self-study,
I have come to the realisation that the more I study, the harder it gets,
especially because of the 3 different writing systems Japanese possesses, which
are namely Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Without doubt, Kanji would be the most
difficult of all to learn. Therefore, until this day, I am still on the journey
to finally master the Japanese language, even though I may still be a rookie in
terms of correctly writing and fluently speaking in Japanese.
In conclusion, what I think is coolest
in Japan is the language. It entwines all aspects that are essentially
Japanese, be it society, anime, culture, lifestyle, you name it. The Japanese
language is at the core of all things Japanese, and that is why I think Cool Japan
is Cool Japanese.
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