Nirven - Tumblr Posts
personal question to you my dear friend. What inspired you to learn languages such as Russian and Japanese? Any interesting stories associated with that inspiration? :3
〔Short Answer〕
I’m very fluent in ENG but I was always lacking in my mother tongue, Filipino — specifically Tagalog. I was always busy trying to improve my FIL, so honestly, I never intended to learn JP or RUS. But then I joined the BBAU fandom and there were alot of foreigners (non-American)! Especially alot of non-English-speakers. I guesstimated that the most spoken non-English languages were JP and RUS because I saw alot of Japanese fans, and also there were three Russian BB mods so I figured that there must’ve been a pretty big RUS fandom.
Though, if I knew what I knew now, then I would say that there’s actually a bigger Korean ACTIVE fandom on Twitter than an Russian ACTIVE fandom — alot of the Russian fans are probably on VK or Insta…
But anyway, that’s really it!…
〔Long Answer〕
I grew up surrounded by alot of Japanese media, my dad is a total weeb but he watches Japanese anime the same way you’d watch American cartoons — aka, treats it like ordinary television. The Philippines has a very big anime streaming community, back then in the 1990s we had anime be dubbed in Filipino so we could air it on TV. And that attitude hasn’t changed in moderns time because have entire Youtube channels dedicated to subbing anime in English, and fandubbing in Filipino because we’re that big of nerds with Northeastern Asian media. So my parents grew up with anime, therefore I grew up with anime
As for Russian media, I only became aware of it much later on around middleschool. But at that point I only knew stereotypes, a far cry from the intimate relationship I had with Japanese media and culture. Only in junior highschool did I start to humanise the country’s identity, after I became a big fan of Boris, Ferry Nopanaman and CFMOT.
Combine those pre-established factors with the yearning to interact with the BBAU fandom as a newborn returner, I was pretty persuaded to cram JP and RUS with my FIL studies.