Anime and Books and Stuff
I haven’t put much thought into my own likes and preferences, I am more in the mindset of just knowing where they are and enjoying them. Knowing exactly why I like something, knowing exactly how these things have affected my life, those are just extra. Just bathe in the ecstasy and if I come out a little different in the end then that’s fine.
Though, saying that, I’ve definitely got a mental attachment to works that come out of Japan. Needless to say, that the words, language, culture, history etc. behind each work be it a TV show or a novel are going to be varying degrees of different than if was to be in English, it’s probably a mixture of those that I’ve internally romanticized.
Learning Japanese
I’m currently at a level where I can read books on my kindle (with a built-in dictionary) and can play my cutie JRPGs (with a Google page ready to search new words), without much trouble. If I could choose to have the original text with 75% comprehension or translated/localized text with 100% comprehension, I would choose the latter 0% of the time. Check out Persona Problems if you want an illustration of why.
My journey with learning Japanese started with Ixrec’s Guide to Japanese, grinded some basic Anki decks on grammar and then just jumped in VNs with a text parser, skip a few years I passed the July 2017 JLPT for level N1, and we’re all caught up. I'm not sure if I recommend a route like mine but I atleast had fun making my own way.