にほんご novelty

にほんごは、for many learners, seems to be a novelty.
When they first start, the class seems interesting and おもしろい。
As the difficulty increases they lose interest pretty fast. This is, of course, a common phenomenon.

Judging by the pace of our class, I can sort of see why this is the case. The people who are really interested in learning about the Japanese language and culture have already been exposed, to a quite large degree, to a lot of the idiosyncrasies of にほんご　and get past the initial learning stages with no trouble at all.

I get the impression that a lot of people are turned off because the pacing is a little quick, with a lot of vocab and not too much cultural immersion.
When I was in Japan this summer, every minute I felt like I was learning so much about にほんのculture and language (even when I wasn't doing anything!). It really is the feeling of immersion that you need to be really interested in learning about a language and culture.

Same with ちゅうごくご。　I'm a pretty pragmatic thinker, so I would never learn Chinese if I didn't feel a reason to. Even now I know very few people who only speak Chinese, so I don't have much interest in learning it. I'm starting to listen to some C-POP and Taiwan-Pop so I have a little more impetus. And why learn かんこくご？　That seems more practical to me than Chinese, since a lot of Korean people seem to speak exclusively in Korean to each other, and I want to know what they're saying. It's also a little novel, since I know lots of people study Chinese and Japanese but not Korean for some reason...