No Stupid Questions

(Besides Anime)

It's pretty much entirely because anime (and adjacent content). You can't exclude that and expect a coherent answer.

People learn languages when they have a cultural reason to do so -- such as engaging with media in that language or wanting to interact with people who speak it (for business/relationships/diplomacy/whatever).

Hollywood movies and rock-and-roll were big drivers that pushed people to learn English last century. Programming and the internet probably pushed a bunch of people to learn it in the last ~20 years. K-Pop and K-Drama have been drivers for learning Korean recently. German was one of the major languages (along with French) for math and science before WWI -- but was overtaken by English after that. You get the picture, I hope.

If the US continues on its current path, maybe in a few decades all the new research papers coming out will be in Chinese instead and everyone will learn Mandarin to discuss new tech. 🤷️

It's because of anime and video games.

OP, what do you think a weeb is?

It's like asking why fishermen want to learn about casting techniques instead of drone piloting.

Japan projects soft power as a place that has fine crafts, allows different ideas to flourish and creates bleeding edge technology. Learning Japanese is seen as a high prestige activity due to that.

Nevermind that in reality it's a misogynistic and tradition oriented society that is extremely xenophobic. Cars! Anime! Vidja! Caligraphy!

Due to the authoritarian CCP, and being a source of the cheapest, lowest quality goods, china does not have that kind of reputation.

Even though shitloads of electronics, consumer technology manufacturing, and etc are produced in china.

Both sides of both coins are true. However, the reputation is not the same.

I don't think they're looking for the easiest language. Learning any language is hard. There must be a motive to take on such a task.

Weebs love Japanese anime so they want to learn the language. I doubt many people are into Chinese anime or manhua aside from native speakers.

The people in the nebulously defined West didn't get into Asian comics first and then gravitated towards the Japanese offerings. Japanese manga companies saw a market for expansion and took advantage of it. Manga is Japanese in the minds of consumers. Most people probably aren't aware of the Chinese or Korean varieties. Interest in the language came after.

Japanese may be easier to pronounce for us atonal alphabetters. I would say Chinese beats Japanese by having simpler grammar. None of these linguistic reasons matter though. There are plenty of people who learn mandarin today but they didn't get into it through comics. Most Japanese learners don't do it for business reasons. The stereotypes are different.

Weebs are people who like Japan. That's why they learn Japanese.

Yes, Mandarin is probably the most difficult language to learn. I had an easier time with Arabic for what I needed it for. Japanese is not that hard because I already know multiple languages. The main issue is that the read between the lines aspect of every language makes it difficult. You can learn languages on a surface level but completely miss the actual conversation.

Honestly, I don't see any reason for weebs to like the Japanese language other than their love for Japanese anime, which is immensely popular. I actually have a close friend who speaks Japanese sentences, even though the language is completely different from our language, and learning any language, especially Asian ones, is very difficult! But being passionate about a language and surrounding yourself with it makes it much easier.

I started being interested in japan because of anime, vns, and japanese music, so that naturally lead to an interest in the language. Personally I also just like the way japanese sounds, but don't really like the sound of chinese. And because of those interests, it's also more immediately useful.

Japanese also seems easier to me (both the pronunciation and overall structure) but that might just be a result of consuming japanese media for a long time.

And yes, there are chinese anime too, but they're overall less well known even though there are some pretty good ones.

I looked into learning Mandarin - because it is a good financial decision. I started to learn some of the basic Japanese fonts because it seemed doable and fun.

I could get around with a single alphabet vs 2500 signs.
And don't even start me on the tonal part. I'm considering if I really want to learn Chinese I actually have to think about it as singing and not as a language.

Lastly: I waste my life reading online magas - the Japanese and Korean ones are just higher quality, and I found less than a dozen readable Chinese ones.
Their storyboard is just that foreign - spending panels on things that doesn't make sense translated to English, then skipping important details and just leave me hanging with the story.
And they just span like 400 episodes for no good reason.

But if you have a great adventure /romance / fantasy recommendation that has a good female lead with male characters actually having a personality I am all up for it! Ohh and the story also not just the Palace and harem and eperor bs...