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Kamalea Cott,Technical Localization Specialist, Washington State
Hello.
 I assume you're here because you have the chance to study Japanese, and you're wondering what's in it for you, as opposed to all the other things you could do with your time.
I could tell you why I started learning Japanese (college language requirement) or why I kept studying it (I wanted to read manga) or why I still care (translation is my job, and I'm going to maintain and deepen my Japanese skills for the rest of my life). But those things only apply to me. Let's talk about you.
I tried to brainstorm who you are, and came up with four possibilities.
Let's see if any of them fit.
Type A: You love Japan or Japanese culture. There's some big carrot that motivates you: relatives, heritage, tradition, history, music, stories, romance... I started out as one of you, and I pretty much still am.
Type B: You need to meet some language or humanities requirement, and you're considering Japanese.
Type C: You love language on general principles, and you want to study languages. Maybe you don't really care which ones or you plan to study a lot of them.
Type D: You are career-minded. You want to go into a field with solid job prospects. Maybe there are certain industries you want to get into: technology, entertainment, legal fields or economics or patents; there are lots of potential intersections of other fields with Japanese.
Type A: Lovers of Japan or Japanese Culture
...I don't really need to convince you. You know what you're doing and why. Go for it!
Type B: Requirements to Meet
So you need to meet a requirement. You may find my arguments for types C and D interesting, so I urge you to read this whole essay. But first, let's address you specifically, in case you're still on the fence about it: why should you study a language at all? What's in it for you?
Many of the benefits of Japanese apply also to other languages. Among those benefits are deep familiarity and love of another culture and a widened worldview, along with a certain flexibility of mind. If you progress to any degree of proficiency in a language, you will find, like translators and interpreters before you, that nothing is better practice for thinking deeply about meaning and interpretation or for thinking on your feet under pressure. Rate these as benefits of language study in general, and read on if you want my view of the attractions of Japanese specifically.
Type C: Lovers of Language
So you know you want to learn a language, and you have some idea of why. Maybe you're a language geek. Maybe you love to talk to people, and some of those people speak Japanese. Maybe you're intrigued by complicated systems; maybe you've studied many languages already, or maybe you haven't but you think you'd like to. There are many reasons why Japanese is attractive to people interested in language in general.
- Complicated and unclear origins. How the Japanese writing system came about is pretty clear—though there's enough there to study for several lifetimes—but as you may know, the spoken language is much older, and not clearly closely related to any other language. There is a great confusion of theories about this, of various degrees of crackpottedness, which can be fascinating to trace—and it's an open area of debate. If you're interested in the history of languages, it's a mystery for you.
- Japanese is not much like English at all. Let me clarify what I mean: the tools of Japanese do not have a 1:1 correspondence to the tools of English, and nor do the assumptions. For example, by default Japanese sentences do not specify whether a noun is plural or singular, whereas in English you often literally cannot talk about a thing unless you know whether there's more than one of it.
Japanese sentence structure is completely different from English. A long Japanese sentence is a series of nested loops, with important nouns and verbs tagged to indicate interrelationship, and an overall verb at the end. If the verb is transitive, the thing or person who does it is often left out. It probably wouldn't give you a bad translation—awkward maybe but not inaccurate—if you took a Japanese sentence and converted its elements to English in exactly backwards order. Some elements of Japanese sentences, like the final verb, always have to be reshuffled for natural English. You can imagine what fun this is for simultaneous interpretation: you have to listen to the entire Japanese sentence and hear the verb at the end, before you can properly start the English sentence! And while you're mumbling the English as fast as you can, the speaker has gone on to their next sentence, which you somehow have to memorize through to the end so you can translate it while you're hearing and memorizing their next sentence... It's hardcore.
Machine translation is a long, long way from being able to deal with J-to-E or E-to-J translation and produce output that's either accurate or sensible. It's a task so difficult it requires a human.
- The writing system is pretty cool and it looks neat. Did you know Japanese has two phonetic syllabaries in addition to the Chinese-derived kanji? You get to learn them all! Also, unlike English, pronunciation and spelling of Japanese is easy: if you see something written in hiragana you can read it aloud correctly pretty soon, and if you hear something spoken you can spell it correctly in hiragana. Now, learning to write and recognize enough kanji to read novels or newspapers or high-level manga takes a long time. Roughly, in my opinion, as long as it takes to memorize the spelling and pronunciation of an adequate subset of English words.
- Unlike Sindarin or Latin, there are a lot of people speaking and writing Japanese right now. There is beautiful elegant historic Japanese, and beautiful apt modern Japanese, and more being used to create something every minute. Learning Japanese opens up a lot of material otherwise unavailable to you. Japanese is a language of power and a living language, as well as still being pretty mysterious in the West.
Type D: Career-Minded
So you're career-minded. You're probably aware of the massive amount of material Japan produces: technology and consumer goods, literature and music, movies and video games, comic books and cartoons. For all these things there are large, established, and growing audiences outside Japan.
Remember what I said about machine translation being ludicrously inadequate for the Japanese/English language pair? That's probably true of Japanese and any of the romance languages. It takes a person with both skill and experience to produce sensible English from Japanese. If you get yourself that skill and experience, be assured that the need for Japanese translators is not going to go away any time soon.
Japanese-to-English translation is a highly skilled craft and it's possible to make a good living at it. If you choose to become a freelancer, it also offers a great deal of freedom. I've only worked in-house, as a regular employee of a larger company, but it's good to know I will have the freelancer option as fallback throughout my life. By retirement age I confidently expect to be able to support my grandchildren by translating freelance from my yacht in the South Pacific. You too can imagine hitchhiking Europe from hotspot to hotspot, toting only your trusty laptop and dictionary!
Of course it isn't all beer and skittles; if you freelance you also have to establish relationships with a bunch of clients who want to send you work, and you have to convince them to pay you fair rates, and then you have to be responsive and disciplined and on-call—but I hear it can work out very well. If you want more information on career stuff, I suggest lurking on the Honyaku list at Google Groups.
Whatever your reasons for considering Japanese, and whether you just get your toes wet or work with Japanese all your life, I hope you enjoy where it takes you. I've certainly enjoyed my time with it so far.
(February 2010)
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