The very thought me taking that final step of being an Otaku Gaijin fills me with a certain amount of pride and dread (pread? dride?). Nothing says "Hard Core Geek" like learning Japanese.

What has made me take the plunge is a rather long rant, involving a whiteboard, lots of beers, and Jason Stormchild. He was showing me some Kanji, and how some kanji have an etymological basis. To the right, you can see the kanji for 'sun' and 'moon'. When you put those two characters together, you get the kanji for 'bright'. Similarly, the kanji for 'forest', is 3 trees done up together. Finally, there is the kanji for 'east', which is a combination of the kanji for sun and the kanji for tree, so it is like the sun rising in the east, peeking out through the trees.

It was this explanation (which, was way more poetically put by Jason) plus the repeated assertions that I would be one of the people to get a lot out of learning kanji that made me take the plunge. Learning a new verbal language has the same kind of potential as learning a new programming language, except, I rather suspect, that instead of changing the way you think about programming, it changes the way you think about thinking.