Why I chose to study Japanese

If you know me, I'm an engineer and I've fulfilled my language requirement at Columbia already. Why am I taking Japanese then? Learning new languages has always been a passion of mine as evident in my fluency in 4 languages already. However, as a native Korean speaker, I believed that Japanese would be, in a way, the easiest yet most novel language to learn while remaining pertinent to my career. Tokyo is still a major market in the Asia-Pacific market, and to be able to bridge the gaps between Seoul, London, Frankfurt, New York, and Tokyo, just to name a few, would offer me a much more worldly business experience. The most challenging part of learning Japanese has been to learn a new alphabet/writing system (or 3), as this is the first time I had to learn an alphabet that wasn't closely related to Roman characters (Cyrillic, I must admit is a lot easier to read than Japanese). But now that I have gained a basic grasp of Hiragana, I am very eager to read whatever I can, and although I still struggle to understand much, I know this is just part of the learning experience.