How would you counterfactually spend that time if you decide against it? The rapid rise of real time highly accurate machine translation is making language learning less valuable, but if the alternative is, for example, scrolling through TikTok, then it's still probably preferable to learn Japanese

@TheAllMemeingEye Not entirely sure; probably reading history books. I agree that perfect machine translation would make language learning unnecessary, but I think we are far from that point.

I'm currently trying it. If you like challenges and learning languages, you should try. But after you get the hiragana and katakana down, switch to using a grammar book and an Anki deck and reading stuff.

@CraigDemel The primary reason I would even consider this is that Japan has a large >125 IQ population (possibly the 3rd highest in the world; not sure how to count India) with a relatively low knowledge of English.

@EnopoletusHarding I'm learning for similar reasons - Japan punches above its population size in terms of cultural output and I want to experience some of it.

My experience after a year is 1) Duolingo is a fun and somewhat educational game, but it won't get you there 2) Japanese is fairly logical in structure 3) The language embeds some very interesting cultural things (levels of formality, passive tense) 4) kanji is the hardest part so far.