this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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Sino
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Oh yeah, it's actually very funny that if you say you're a Chinese learner, people will assume you're doing something very sophisticated like reading Maoist literature or classical Chinese poems or something and not just like watching 动画 but if you say you're a Japanese learner, people will assume it's definitely for anime
I think I heard once that anime weebs comprise actually the majority of Japanese learners, and I will never not feel just a twinge of embarassment knowing that that is me as well.
But hey, at least I can take comfort knowing that my boomer mom also decided to start studying Japanese because of the cartoons, so it's evidently not just a socially awkward young person thing.
Also an unfortunately not insignificant share of the people in my life can't distinguish Chinese from Japanese to begin with, so.
Synthesis: Use your mad ~~感じ~~ 漢字 skills to learn 中文 faster
You kid, but that was literally something I told myself to justify learning Japanese: "It'll help me learn Chinese... later on."
Turns out that having reasons for learning languages is overrated, anyways. I still have "justifications" for learning languages but over time you just grow fond of the languages themselves to the point where learning feels self-sustaining. I think I have a decent theoretical knowledge of Chinese by this point but just haven't built up enough momentum to say I'm actually learning it yet, and who knows when that will be.
I mean, some Maoists (usually the real cranks, which tend to be ~95% of Maoism in the West) like to insist you absolutely have to learn Chinese to understand Maoism, so it's probably a self perpetuating assumption in communist spaces specifically. (I'm not a Maoist. I just deal with their nonsense more often than I'd like to.)