It’s been exactly a year since Jeremy and I were in Japan, and my fascination with the country has not abated in the intervening time. If anything, I’d say it’s grown stronger.

In the months leading up to last year’s trip, I threw myself whole-heartedly into learning what little Japanese I could in order to be able to get around and communicate more easily. I’ve dabbled in quite a few languages in my time—German, obviously, but also French, Italian, Irish (ancient and modern), Welsh, Latin, and even Catalan—but coming to terms with Japanese was a revelation for me.

I’m not really sure why, to be honest. Maybe because it’s the first non-Indo-European language I’ve ever tried to learn (figuring out how to say “Thank you very much” in Tlingit doesn’t really count). Maybe because it’s the first language with a non-Roman character set that I’ve ever seriously grappled with (I had some mini-breakthroughs with Thai when we were in Thailand, but I never sat down and really tried to learn the alphabet). Or maybe I had simply assumed that a notoriously difficult language with three different alphabets was beyond my ability to grasp, so I’m surprised that Japanese is not as opaque as I feared it would be.

Whatever the reason, I’m still getting great pleasure out of attempting to learn the language. Unsurprisingly, my self-study motivation waned when I no longer faced the prospect of an imminent trip to Japan, so I’ve tried to re-motivate myself by signing up for a Japanese class at City College Brighton and Hove.

It’s been a long time since I sat in a beginners’ language class, and the experience has been rather funny. The students are mixed bag, mostly on the younger end of the age scale and pretty equally divided between guys and girls. As usual in a language class, there are the students who feel compelled to show off every little bit of the language they already know, there are the ones who clearly know more than they’re letting on, and there are the ones who struggle a bit. Because of its “cool factor”, Japanese particularly seems to attract several of the first type of student: the young anime fans who know the odd bit of slang and like to paint kanji characters on their denim jackets. As someone who has actually been to Japan but doesn’t feel the need to trumpet that fact in class, I probably fall into the second camp. As for the ones who struggle, I give them the most credit; it takes guts to take on any new language, but especially one as daunting as Japanese. And some of the students in class aren’t even native English speakers, so they’re learning one foreign language through another—that’s brave.

The class has been fun so far, and it’s good to have someplace other than E-Kagen to practice my fledgling Japanese. My only real complaint is that it’s held on Monday nights, which means I miss University Challenge—but these are the sacrifices we have to make for knowledge. Anyway, that’s what the BBC iPlayer is for.