I have grown quite fond of Portuguese and Italian, both derivatives of the parent Latin. I study Welsh because I was born speaking it and English in my household, and because I feel that continued study of Cymraeg does honour to my ancestors.
As for the Eastern languages, I got involved with the study of Japanese when a businessman from Japan moved in a couple of houses down the street. His missus was the one who taught me the basics, and the rest I picked up from dictionaries, guide books and a couple of other sources available at the time.
The interest in Mandarin Chinese, of course, emerged when I first saw Firefly and Serenity on DVD. Unlike Japanese, which has two syllabaries - katakana and hiragana - Chinese has but a single, complex alphabet.
The good news is, since Japanese kanji is basically a version of the Chinese script that made its way across the water, I am already familiar with the Chinese script somewhat - even if I don't know the pronunciation for the sign for rain in Mandarin, for example, I'd recognise the symbol because I have seen it appear in Japanese in a sentence which reads "it is raining."
Linguistic Preferences
As for the Eastern languages, I got involved with the study of Japanese when a businessman from Japan moved in a couple of houses down the street. His missus was the one who taught me the basics, and the rest I picked up from dictionaries, guide books and a couple of other sources available at the time.
The interest in Mandarin Chinese, of course, emerged when I first saw Firefly and Serenity on DVD. Unlike Japanese, which has two syllabaries - katakana and hiragana - Chinese has but a single, complex alphabet.
The good news is, since Japanese kanji is basically a version of the Chinese script that made its way across the water, I am already familiar with the Chinese script somewhat - even if I don't know the pronunciation for the sign for rain in Mandarin, for example, I'd recognise the symbol because I have seen it appear in Japanese in a sentence which reads "it is raining."