[koibito]

I've been studying Japanese since I was in the seventh grade. The reason it's been taking me so long is that in the beginning I got really frustrated with particles! I would learn something new in my lesson book. Then I would try to translate a song (another problem is probably that I couldn't find any lower level reading material) but I would get hung up on concepts like "mo ... nai" or "dore gurai". I have since beaten into myself the basic meanings of 'ha', 'wo', 'ni', 'de' etc. but I still struggle with levels of trueness, where you use grammar to show how certain or hypothetical a thing is. It's a concept I consider to be very peculiar to Japanese.