I’ve known ‘さようなら’ since I was like 8, but I had no idea it was Japanese XD (probably because of how Americans pronounce it…) I also knew how to say hello in tons of languages including Japanese because of my 弟’s old board book about ppl around the world.
For me it was saying goodnight, I don't know why but I've always know how to say. Good night lol
I knew many hundreds of misc words from nearly 20 years of Japanese games, anime, and music, but by far my favorite, one of my favorite Japanese words, is my preferred way to say 'best friend', まぶ達 / まぶだち
Awesome. I wish I had started my proper Japanese studying as a teen.
Me, too. I taught myself hiragana and katakana in my free periods at school along with basic numbers, colours, animals etc but I stopped after I graduated. Then I did nothing until I was 25 and started to study Japanese again at university, seriously this time.
Wish I had the chance to take Japanese lessons when I was younger, my school only taught French as a foreign language though (and I’ve forgotten almost all of it now).
Oooh, the nostalgia. For some reason, the first animations broadcast to our ratty black-and-white TVs after the revolution in my country were anime. Heidi, Candy Candy, Hana no Ko Lunlun. They were dubbed, but you could hear the original voices under the poorly timed, poorly translated, pooly acted lines. I drank them in! These were, for me, the first stories meant for children that weren't didactic, stiff and full of propaganda. The first word I probably caught the meaning of was "sayounara".
But THEN. Then came Sailor Moon. Would I watch it now - erm, no, thanks. But back then? It was huge. It kept up my spirits through some horrid school years. Aaaand it was still poorly dubbed. I figured out "minna", "tsuki" and "usagi". I learned what a "dango" was (odango atama!). I knew the opening and closing credits by heart, but it was all soramimi, reproducing the sounds as best I could.
By then I had read Shogun and learned mono no aware, harakiri, seppuku and kinjiru. But I wouldn't have taken up Japanese later if it hadn't been for Sailor Moon.
Uh-oh, big paragraphs and using the word "nostalgia". I'm officially old. (-__-)
my first manga ever was 終わりのセラフ which I read when I was like 13/14 and it had the romanji written on the cover for it, so my first japanese words were 終わり, の and セラフ bc セラフ is really just seraph and I managed to interpolate the rest lol. it actually took me strangely long to jump from manga to anime, so I always knew less Japanese than my friends lol
Learned plenty of words when I started listening to J-rock around 2020/2021
One of the first words that really stuck in my head was 音楽 (おんがく/ ongaku), or "music", which was probably from a Yorushika song 「だから僕は音楽をやめた」
It was when I began to compare the original lyrics of JP songs with English romaji that I started piecing together which sounds correlated to which characters, which then led to me teaching myself the definitions of specific words by putting it side-by-side with an English translation, and then turned into me trying to mentally reverse engineer grammar patterns without even realizing it. When I started taking classes in school, it made me realize how much I had inadvertently taught myself because I listened to so much Japanese music. So thx, n-bunaさん (among others)!
