"Je ne parle pas de Japonais."

A few days ago I went into a video game store. Whilst the titles were in Roman script, the rest was Greek to me.
Yesterday, British Girl showed me where the manga is. Of course, I could read none of it.
I must learn Japanese.
Sure, there's practical considerations. I'd like to be able to, say, interact with the world around me on a daily basis and do all sorts of practical stuff, but having lots of sweet looking comics and video games dangled in front of me is quite the carrot. You here that? "Awesome video games" is more of a motivator to me than "going to the post office without an interpreter." Watashi wa huge geek.
So, I'm diving into studies. Japanese doesn't actually seem that difficult. The spoken language is fairly straightforward, none of the bajillion rules and exceptions that we have in English, and all of the phonetic sounds in Japanese also occur in English, so pronunciation is a breeze.
But the written language is a little daunting.
The two phonetic alphabets don't seem that bad. I'm picking up the hiragana and katakana fairly quickly, but the fact that there are two completely redundant phonetic systems seems a little weird to me. Ah well.
And then there are the Kanji.
The Kanji are also completely redundant. All of the phonetics of the Kanji can be made using just the Hiragana (and sometimes are), but there are a number of homonyms in Japanese that apparently the Kanji clarify is written language. Personally, eye love homonyms, and don't sea how this is much of a problem. But people tell me that the Kanji have all kinds of subtleties, so I'll just take their word for it.
One weird thing, that's happening, though, is that the latent part of my brain that knows some French has started to become active again. I suppose that French is what I think of when I think of "crazy non-English foreign talk," and thus it's started to surface.
Now, I hated French in high school. Not because of the subject matter, mind you, but because my teachers were real chiennes. They hated me. I hated them. I gained a subconcious hostility to learning foreign languages for quite a while. In fact, my antipathy towards foreign languages is part of the reason why I've got a B.S. in Political Science rather than a B.A.- I decided that calculus was far more bearable than ever having to take a foreign language course again.
I blame my evil French teachers.
Anyway...
Hip-Hop speaks a little French (about as much as me), and we've sometimes interpersed it with English and Japanese, mostly to drive our manager crazy. The Manager is actually a really cool guy, and speaks pretty good English, even though he's always putting himself down. Partly because of my bubbling up memories, and partly because of banter with Hip-Hop I've started mixing in French, sometimes unconciously, when I've tried to say stuff in Japanese. I think I've said "pardonnez moi," on the street instead of "sumi ma sen." I've actually said "bonjour" to people, and I think that a "c'est vrai" came out once. As you can see, I don't even speak that much French. We're talking bare-bones high school remnants here, but they're reappearing anyway. I thought that I'd left French on the regrettable slag pile of high school memories, but it's come back, somehow. I'm interested in it again, along with Japanese.
So, I had an hour or so between classes a few nights ago, and was out walking. I looked at the various signs, and tried to pick out the kana and kanji that I could recognize (not very much of it) and I was suddenly struck with a sort of epiphany: I will not die monolingual. I'm in Japan for a year, living in a different language environment, and you don't really get a better learning opportunity than that. I'm going to learn Japanese, dammit. And I'm going to take another look at French. Hey, if two year olds can learn languages, I can to.
I figure I'm 26, so I've got plenty of time to practice. And English, Japanese, and French would be a pretty wicked trifecta of languages to know. English and French together can get you almost anywhere in Europe, and there's no shortage of cool stuff in Japanese.
Yeah.
I can do this.