Japanese is a Meme Language

No jokes allowed: learning Japanese is a super serious business. 

The title of this entry got me permanently banned from the Discord server of the Learn Japanese Subreddit. I love Japanese, but I can't fucking stand half the people who study it. 

But I couldn't care less about being banned by some random server that's clearly full of ignorant mods who can't comprehend how calling Japanese a meme language could be a reverence. Why would I want to talk with those idiots anyway? I will however take this opportunity to expand on the idea.

It goes without saying (or at least, I thought it did) but of course, obviously, Japanese is a real language spoken by real people to live their lives, think, communicate, do business, experience art, read the news, and so on. It's not strictly a meme language, and it has a rich history that inspires admiration and wonder in everyone who knows it. 

But Japanese is undeniably full of memes. Americans have meme-ified Japanese. Which means everyone who learns even one word or phrase of Japanese (perhaps BAKA or OMAE WA MOU SHINDERU!) has fun with it. Compare that to Spanish, for example, which many of us studied for years in high school. Is it nearly as entertaining for a casual? 

Plus it's so easy to be a character in Japanese. Want to sound like a little girl? Just change "watashi" to "atashi". Want to sound like an old wizard? Replace "da" with "ja". In English if you want to sound like a little girl all you can really do is raise your voice higher and maybe say "like" a lot. 

Obviously when you get serious about studying Japanese, it's not as simple. But the point is that Japanese is a fun and entertaining language for everybody, whether you study it seriously or not. That's anything but disrespect for the language I've personally invested over 2000 hours into and enjoyed 100% of that time.