Full transcript of “Why I decided to go to Japanese language school at 36 years old”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 Hi all, welcome back to another video. Today I want to talk about why I decided to go to Japanese language school at the age of 36. It's not every day that a 36 year old wakes up and goes, "I want to go to language school. So let's make it happen." So let me give you some context and a little bit of my backstory. I'm about to turn 40 this year. Which means, I grew up in the 90's and early 2000's. That was the decade that I spent my childhood in. In the 90's, Japan was an economic powerhouse. Anime was starting to become a massive soft power. J-pop was extremely popular in the early 2000s. Made popular by artists like Ayumi Hamasaki, Namie Amuro. Koda Kumi, and BoA. So I was
0:47 exposed to anime in my childhood. I've watched Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon on TV, but they were always dubbed in English. In high school, I joined the anime club where they showed Inuyasha, voiced in Japanese. And I started to listen to J-pop. Ayumi Hamasaki was one of my favorite artists of all time. Her lyrics are so poetic and reflective. Her music videos at that time was out of this world--breathtakingly beautiful and artistic. Having been exposed to Japanese culture I thought to myself, "The Japanese language is so beautiful. It's so elegant and eloquent. When I listen to Japanese, I feel as if I am transformed to a softer and more delicate world." Now,
1:35 can Japanese sound harsh and crude? Yes. But in general, Japanese is not a harsh sounding language at all. To my ears, it's a very tender language. So the language piqued my curiosity. Japanese felt like a code that I had to crack. It was an itch I needed to scratch. And going to language school really was about understanding and learning the language. It wasn't about anime. It wasn't about me, romanticizing the culture. It wasn't about the food. I knew the pros and cons of Japan. Yes, there are cons to Japan. Nobody really likes talking about them, but they exist. So for me, it really was the language. Japanese was a puzzle I had to solve. And I remember when I was about to
2:22 enter college in 2003, I had to choose a major. My heart was saying, "Major in foreign language with an emphasis in Chinese and minor in Japanese." For those of you who don't know, the Chinese language is my first love. It is my deepest and truest love. Hence, the emphasis on Chinese. So my heart was saying, "foreign language." But my mind was saying, "Let's be practical now. What are you going to do with a foreign language degree?" Even though I love the Chinese language, I had no intentions of living and working in China. So my love for the language is a very pure love for the language. It wasn't a means to an end. I don't need to use Chinese for anything in my life other than my own pure enjoyment of knowing it. So what am I going to do with a foreign language degree? I
3:14 couldn't answer that question. And in the early 2000's, Finance was the "IT" industry--finance and computer science. Just like how these days, everyone wants to be a YouTuber and influencer. Back in the days, everyone wanted to be a a financial analyst, personal banker, stock trader, or a computer engineer. Now, I'm not a techie. I'm still not a techie, so computer engineer was out of the question. But being the practical and realistic person that I was, I decided to ignore my heart and major in business because that was supposedly where the money was at. And that was strike one for me. Take it from me, don't ignore your heart. In my last last year in college,
4:00 I remember seeing a poster about studying abroad in Japan. I think it was like for one quarter. It was like a university exchange program that my university had with a sister university in Japan. And I thought about it and my heart was like, "You know, it's just one quarter for you to experience Japan. Maybe you should go." But think about it was all I did. I didn't actually pull the trigger. And it was due to fear. At that point in my life, I've never traveled to a foreign country by myself before. Let alone, lived in a foreign country where I didn't speak the language. Even if it was just 3 months, it felt daunting. So strike two for me. After I graduated from college,
4:48 I had to look for a job and I saw that there was a program called the JET program, which stands for Japan exchange and teaching program. So I researched this program and thought maybe I would go to Japan and teach for a year. This program required a recommendation letter, and I went to my university work study's supervisor and asked her for a recommendation letter. And I remembered when I was asking her, she looked kind of mad and said that I should write a recommendation letter for myself and if she agrees with what I said, she'll sign off on it. And I was very devastated when she said that because I thought it was her way of rejecting my request. And I couldn't figure out why she rejected me because I was always on really good terms with her. It wasn't until much
5:35 later in my life and with more life experience that I realized she probably just didn't know how to write one. And because she is Chinese, she was trying to "save face." But even then, to me, if someone asks me for a recommendation letter and I tell that person to write one for themselves and I'll sign off on it if I agree with it, I feel like that's very rude. Especially if I've worked with that person for a long period of time and we are on very good terms with each other. But hey, that's just me. Needless to say, I did not do the JET program and I did not go to Japan. In hindsight, that actually worked out for me. I think I would have hated my experience in the JET program. So passing up on the JET program was strike three for me. I
6:24 stopped thinking about going to Japan or Japanese for a very long time after that. I was too busy either finding a job, getting a job, working the job, and paying the bills. I had moments here and there where I tried to pick up Japanese but I never made it past hiragana and katakana. In 2017, I went to Japan for a 2 week vacation, and it sparked that long lost desire in me to learn Japanese. Unfortunately, I had a job that was really stressful and took all of my time. 11 hours of actual clocking in with a 1-hour lunch break slipped in between. And a 3-hour roundtrip commute by driving. That's 14 hours a day. Needless to say, when I'm not working, I just wanted to sleep.
7:14 So try as I might, I never made it past learning hiragana and katakana. By the end of 2017, I burned myself out at my job. And a year and a half later, I quit. Yes, it took me a year and a half later to to quit. At 34 years old, I said, "Enough is enough. For once in my life, I'm going to go do the things I want to do. Before I leave this world--before I exit this game called life, I want to know how it feels to actually live." And I'm saying this because I have lived a very different life than anyone I've ever met. So I told everyone that I'm going to go travel and see the world. And it might take me 3 years. It took a lot longer than 3 years, by the way. So
8:02 at 35 years old, I ended up in Tbilisi, Georgia. It's the country right below Russia, by the way. Everyone seems to think I was in the state of Georgia. No, it's actually a country--all the way on the other side of the world. I was living in this co-living space with a whole bunch of digital nomads and entrepreneurs. I met a lot of interesting people there. People who lived outside of the box. While I was there, I did nothing but sleep and whatever I felt like doing. And I was there for like 4 and 1/2 months. And since I had so much free time, I tried to pick up Japanese again. But I couldn't, for the life of me, get past hiragana and katakana. I just couldn't retain the information. There was something that wasn't clicking. Or maybe my brain was still
8:53 short circuited from my burnout. So I woke up one day in Tbilisi, Georgia and thought to myself, "Why not go to Japan and go to language school? Like, what's stopping me from doing that?" And the answer was: nothing. Nothing, but my own fears and trepidation is stopping me. And I thought about it for a while. And my inner dialogue was like, "You know, you said you wanted to live your life for once. That means, you have to go out and do some gosh darn uncomfortable things. Because if you keep doing what you've always done, you're only going to keep getting what you've always gotten. And what have you gotten in life? Not much from what I can see." So I went back to the States,
9:40 applied for language school, and 6 months later, I got my student visa. By the time I was physically in Japan, I was already 37 years old. Moral of the story: don't wait 18 years to go after your heart's desire. If there's something you want to do, and this is a genuine desire you have. You're not doing it because your parents told you; to your teachers told you to; society told you to; the government told you to; your friends told you to. No. This is something that truly comes from within you, then by all means, you have to go after it. You don't really have a choice. It's not a choice. That desire will not go away. That is an itch you will have to scratch, even if it means
10:28 scratching it 18 years later. But don't be like me. Don't wait 18 years to do something you truly want to do. Because you never know, you might not have 18 years. My schoolmates asked me one time if it was worth going to language school because they think I was wasting my time, my money, my energy, going to language school at my age and then leaving after only 6 months. And I said to them, "It is not a waste of anything. I had a desire to go to Japan and learn Japanese since I was what? 18 --19 years old? I would much rather say, I finally went at 37, then to, one day, lie on my deathbed, and think to myself, 'I wish I did more of the things I wanted to do
11:18 in this life. And I wish I went to Japan to study Japanese. I wish... I wish... I wish... and now I am out of time.' " Sometimes, we are so caught up in the day-to-day, nitty-gritty details of living that we forget to zoom out and see life from a bigger perspective. I would much rather say that I have done it late than to not have done it at all. And let me address the elephant in the room that most people love to ignore. Don't think you have forever to do something. Don't wait 18 years the way I did. People like to throw statistics around and say, "The average lifespan for a man is 80
12:03 years old and for a woman is 84 years old." And so they automatically assume that that means they get to live until they're 80. And they think they have plenty of time to do what they want to do. That is a fallacy. Just because the average lifespan is 80 doesn't mean you get to live until you are 80. And I'm not trying to jinx anyone here. But I've seen a lot of people exit this world, in the almost four decades that I've been alive, most of them, did not make it to 80. Like, not even close. I had a colleague she was 1 year younger than me. She passed away November 2023 and she was only 37 at the time. We were hired at the same time, started the job at the same time, went through training
12:53 at the same time, so it was really sad to hear that she passed away. And I can't help but think that when I was 37, I was able to go to Japan and go to language school, but when she was 37, it was the end of the road for her. So don't think you have forever. You never know when the end of the road is for you. It doesn't matter what the statistics say. I know that leaving this world is something that most people don't want to think about. So they try to ignore and forget about it for as long as possible. Until one day, they are completely blindsided by it. But I urge you to think about it. Because it puts life into perspective. Ask yourself, "If today was the
13:38 end of the road for me, would I regret how I have lived my life? Would I regret not going after my dreams?" Your desire, if it is genuinely coming from within you, will not go away. It's not a choice. You don't have a choice. So you might as well face it head on and go after it. And I'll end on that note. As always, if you found any value from my video, please give me a thumbs up. And if you have any questions, comment below. I'll see you next time.またね.
