About Mark Learns Japanese

About This Blog

This is a language learning blog for the Japanese language. This blog is meant to be educational, informative, and entertaining. There may be some strong or offensive language and imagery, but should be few and far between.

This blog tracks the progress of the author's progression into learning the Japanese language and begins already a few weeks into a serious and honest attempt at self-learning the language. The blog discusses what the author has learned or discovered, what methods were used to learn it, links to helpful sites & pages, and anecdotes about the learning process.

This blog also strives to serve as general guide and casual warning to others who wish to teach themselves the Japanese language without attending formal classes. While being self-taught may not be best method, it may be the only method available to some people. The author feels there is a general lack of information how to approach learning the language as a whole for those teaching themselves and hopes this blog can help others fill in the gaps.

This blog is not intended to be a step-for-step guide on how to learn the language. The author is by no means a teacher or language expert.  However, the author does draw on his past experiences learning another language.

About The Author

Mark is a bachelor in his 30's who has had a life long interest in Japan, the Japanese language, and Japanese culture. He works as an IT guy for a telecommunications solution development company. His hobbies include billiards, anime, manga, and general geekery.

This is the authors 5th attempt at learning the language, but only his 1st real serious and structured attempt.This will be the 3rd language the Mark has learned. In addition to his native American English, Mark took 4 years of Spanish and high school and, for a span of about a decade, was fluently able to converse in it. Though he no longer actively practices or uses his Spanish, he is still able to comprehend and speak it decently. After Japanese, Mark plans to learn the basics of Vietnamese as a nod to his future brother-in-laws family. Following that, he may go on to learn Mandarin Chinese, as it is rapidly becoming an essential business language. He will likely have blogs for those attempts as well.

For more information on the learning tools used in the blog, visit the Learning Tools page.