>>113094This is one of the things younger people don't seem to understand about Japanese learning...
To learn Japanese back then you would need to attend specialized college classes in specific universities. You would need to travel for that and if you lived in countries like America you would be paying tens of thousands of dollars for it. Not only that, you needed to be a social butterfly to do the immersion learning by going on regular vacations ($$$) to Japan or go work there. So the irony is you needed to be very normal and social to do it, which shouldn't be an imageboard expectation.
Being able to learn Japanese as a hobby has been a thing for like 10 years, after the old nerds already became too old to do it in a reasonable timeframe. While many things about the modern world is worse, learning Japanese is better so people should recognize that!