Choosing between German and Japanese at 30

I'm 29 and I want to get more serious about learning a 2nd language (my first language is English). I am torn between learning Japanese or German. I don't really have any opportunities to stay abroad for a long period of time, and I doubt I will going forward in life. However, I am interested in travelling at least a couple weeks a year overseas. I could potentially travel for work for short periods of time. My job is in robotics and I also do indie game development. Both countries are major players in robotics. Japan has more history in video games.

I have two driving motivations for learning a second language: 1) I want to challenge myself to learn something very hard and learn a different culture than mine (USA), and 2) I want to read literature and/or play games in their native languages. For challenging myself, I think I lean towards Japanese because it is doesn't use the latin alphabet (which is very interesting to me!) and its culture seems more different than German culture seems to be compared to my own culture. For reading literature, I think I lean towards German because there is such a deep catalog of philosophy and science written in German. Playing video games in their native language probably leans towards Japanese, though, as I know far more games from Japan than from Germany. I guess my end goals would be 1) reading classic literature or playing video games in their native language and 2) travelling to the country and not have to speak English. I think if I want to achieve these goals then I need to commit to one language.

Another thing I am very interested in is learning about how languages express emotions that cannot easily be expressed in English. This kind of ties in with reading literature in other languages I guess. I know that other languages have words for things we don't have words for in English - this is *very interesting* to me.

What other things should I consider when making this decision? Given the reasons I have listed, is there anything that stands out to you as being better fit for one language over the other?

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