My friend was telling me he took a course in Japanese language at city college before the summer last year. The class was huge, mostly people who were anime fans, Cosplay fans, and fans of the culture. He told me as weeks went by, people started to drop out, here and there until there were only FIVE people left in the class.
Learning Japanese takes persistance. Its the “gambarimasu” spirit that must drive you. I have been taking Japanese now for three years. I was working on book one for two years, and started book two, but had to drop out for a short time to find employment. If you don’t work with it constantly, you forget things. So when I started back up again, after finding a job, which took several months, I thought the best thing for me to do was not to continue at the level where I had been, but fall back to the first book, with students who were more advanced along with the firt book. I needed to badly reveiw.
I am so glad I have because its helped me enormously and things start to make more sense then they did the first time around.
The best advice anyone can give you is this. If your learning Japanese you have to surround yourself with the culture. Watch movies and J-dorama with english subtitles but listen to what they say in Japanese. (There are places on the net to find Japanese entertainment including Youtube.com) Listen to Japanese music. If you can become familiar with the food, and the culture as much as you can. If you are lucky to live an a city like I do, that has a huge Asian population you are so much the better, but if you can’t you can do things like go to chat rooms where there are Japanese speakers..find yourself a language exchange partner, someone who wants to learn English and is willing to help you with Japanese.
If you really want to learn the language you will, but it won’t be easy. There are so many things to learn besides learning to speak it. Its best to learn to read it and write it as well, which means learning a whole new set of characters. Its not like french, or spanish because you already know the alpha bet.
As the Japanese say, “Do your best…” Gambatte kudasai!
