I guess I’m drawn to the Japonic world that exists beyond textbooks for learners of Japanese. I feel like Japanese is taught very inefficiently much of the time, because language teaching tends to be a bit superficial in general, and Japanese in particular (and I’m sure also other Japonic or East Asian languages) sees some features unnecessarily exoticized, while other features are contrarily forced into ill-fitting categories of European origin.

So I guess for me, Japonic linguistics is about getting to know Japanese on sort of a deeper level: where the language came from and where it’s going, the diversities of its dialects and sociolects, the various shades of its registers, and the sort of underlying logic of the language.

I really would like to broaden my scope into other Japonic languages than just the big one, and into East Asian languages more broadly, but so far my forays into those other languages have been much more limited.