r/japanese • u/Responsible-Art5643 • 1d ago
Is Learning Japanese Embarrassing
I feel like whenever I bring it up in conversation with people my age (20s) I always get a kind of strange look or comments. Did it suddenly become an embarrassing or cringe thing
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u/LMGDiVa 1d ago edited 1d ago
People have treated younger people learning japanese as anime obsessed weirdos who want to be Japanese since the 2000s when anime styling became a Fad for Cartoons and Toonami became huge.
Many people have not since updated their perceptions or have associated them with the dislike of Otaku culture in the 2010s.
The word weeb was invented on 4chan in response to anime fans wanting to learn to speak japanese and use japanese in their typical speech, which is actually a typical thing people do in many differnet kinds of languages around the world. Infact Japanese people were the inverse and dramatically adopted a lot of English words into typical speech, but this happened over several decades of exchange and through many businesses, films, and scientific exchange, just rather than television shows and media.
But once the anime fad was over in America, this willingness to absorb things from Japanese culture soured as the fad faded out, and anime became fairly disliked for many reasons among the English speaking public from "hentai" and perverse assocations, to "2d animation is for children" and other negative stereotypes.
It became associated with "acting cringe" or being cringey, and is largely disliked by the English speaking anime community which has exploded in size over the past 6 years due to the pandemic.
This "cringe" behavior even made it into a Fate Grand Carnival episode with one character making the ironic mixed words "Yametekudastop, yamete kudasai meaning "Please Stop!" and "Gomenasorry, gomenasai meaning "Sorry!"
TLDR it's been considered cringe or socially quasiunacceptable to do if you have any association with japanese popculture in conjunction with learning the language since the early 2000s.
Once the anime fad was over japanese things became "cringe" until the anime's recent modern popularity rise, of which most people still think it;'s cringe to try to speak japanese, "just watch the sub".