Learning Japanese is such a lonely existence honestly.>Japanese people have this weird communication style where they don't say anything because saying things is rude or something in Japan. Japanese conversations don't as much feel like "dialogs" as that each side just takes turns to "monolog" because having an opinion on what the other is saying is rude.>Consequently, normal "forums" don't really exist in Japanese. 5ch is actually very different from 4chan because on 5chan everyone just responds to the original poster and tells his story with very few people reacting replying to each other>Same with about any Japanese comment section anywhere>You even start to feel completely detached from English language discussion of Japanese fiction, which was never that good to begin with, either because you watched a completely different version because you didn't watch a translation, or because what you read isn't translated to begin with.>Reviews on Japanese bookstores also all just say "The art is pretty and the story is interesting." but otherwise have nothing meaningful to say really.>Unlike all the socially inept weebs drawn to this culture probably because of this, it actually feels like successfully navigating Japanese interactions relies on having superhuman social skills because of how subtle everything is. "Oh, this Japanese person has 5 less meaningless interjections per 2 minutes than is socially expected, this is a clear subtle sign that you're boring him even though he otherwise perfectly hides that he's bored."I can see why this culture is so full of loneliness to the point that 1/3 of its entertainment industry is geared towards nothing but fostering parasocial relationships and people literally pay money to sit down with people and have a conversation. Everything about how they interact just breeds this weird "interacting without it feeling like interaction" thing.
