Mine was at the beginning to be able to read Visual Novels, but now is more than that, I like to learn more and there are few sensations like understanding new “symbols” as words.
For me it started as a weeb thing. I wanted to learn Japanese for the sake of anime, but it quickly changed. Now, I learn it because I find the language itself fascinating, and how it works with their culture.
I started because I was super into Japanese music. This was almost 10 years ago already. But over time I’ve come to appreciate the lenguaje itself. Especially Kanji. Now I love it, and is the main reason why I still go out of my way to learn new vocabulary that I may never use.
That being said, I’m also trying to get into a Japanese university for my masters degree, and I use Japanese every day at my job, so it has financial and professional uses for me as well, and has sort of gone beyond a mere hobby at this point
When I chose to learn it in high school, it was the expression of getting a new challenge for a autistically gifted, yet mind numbingly bored kid. I had stopped due to life and my frustration learning Kanji, which I’m working on it now in Wanikani - that helped tremendously. I’ve come to integrate a lot of Japanese ways into my life since then - food, pop culture, karate, kendo and various other things. Nowadays I picked up on it again for the desire to read more things in the original language to skip translation errors, and later to travel and interact with locals. It might be fun to surprise people that one is not the average 煩い米兵の外人 (loud american foreigner).
I unexpectedly had the opportunity to move to Japan straight after university, and so took it. Before that, Japan and learning Japanese wasn’t even on my radar (I minored in German, hoping to work there actually).
I’ve been here for 5 years now and within the past year, I’ve been itching to try living somewhere else/learn new languages, but it’s not so easy when I’ve invested so much time into Japan/Japanese.
I think source of the motivation for most of us -and also for me- is Japanese culture and their marketing or presentation success of the culture. Of course Japan has so many positive contributions to the world but like every country/culture they have good and bad sides. And the difference is emereges here. They know how to highligt the good sides then takes the peoples attentions
I want to be able to have conversations with people when I travel.