[Khengi]

I think I can give you a more in depth answer to what you're looking for.

My father's side of the family is full Greek, and they learn dozens of languages within their lifespan, so I guess a remnant of that passed down to me. I'm a natural linguistics, having placed in the nation with language arts, and I grasp the concept of linguistics very quickly.

The faster you can learn these things, the faster you can learn Japanese: it isn't English. It isn't similar to English. What you think in English cannot translate exactly to Japanese. Japanese is not just another language, it's another way of thinking.

One mistake students learn in universities is the schools desire to teach the students 丁寧語, which is foolish (the proper form like 'desu' and '-masu'.) The student is supposed to learn the dictionary form of verbs and then learn to conjugate them from there. It is because of this that people who have 4 years of college Japanese under their belt can only understand 7% of an anime episode, can only conjugate normal-intermediate sentences when speaking with a native, and overall never truly feel like they know Japanese, still sounding like a Gaijin when they speak.

I will be perfectly honest with you, Japanese is extremely hard. I started teaching myself from books when I was 16, graduated High School early so I could attend Purdue Calumet, passed Japanese 101, 102, 201 and 202 by testing out of the first three, took the 4th one in-class and became a student teacher for this fall. I'm going for the JLPT2 in December.

I say that to tell you it may be better to practice yourself if you have a knack for languages. You see, there are a lot of things that make becoming fluent in Japanese for an English-native almost unthinkable.

1. It's a pro drop languages, meaning using 'I', 'you', 'they', etc. too much makes you sound foreign (English uses it constantly)

2. All verbs end in 'u', and you need to learn the conjugation differences between the 五段 verbs and 一段 verbs and how they're conjugated (as well as the exception verbs)

3. It is not a language like Spanish, German or French that is so similar to English that in some sentences you can simply translate your thoughts into Japanese perfectly from English. This almost never happens, Japanese doesn't have the equivalent of what English does in most cases. The sentences 'I'm feeling hungry' does not translate as 俺の気持ちがおなかがすいた　(My feeling is hungry)。 This makes no sense, as even though the words are the same to what you want to say, to a Japanese it would sound like "My mood is the stomach empty became". Instead, you would have to DROP the idea of saying 'I'm feeling hungry' and find out the way Japanese do it.

4. As there are less sounds in Japanese, there are homonyms everywhere. While everyone always says that 'Kanji helps lower the problem of homonyms,' what happens when you're speaking? There are no Kanji coming out of your mouth. 木が好き。= I like trees. Now what happen if that first simply is turned into a simple き？Now it can be dozens of things, and there's no way of knowing unless the original writer tells you. While context usually helps the problem, homonyms are still present all the time. Chinese has tones, preventing this problem more, but Japanese even require on-screen dialogue while a TV show is on, as the viewers may not understand what they're saying (I'm talking about natives watching natives, remember).

5. There are 3 written scripts: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana are elementary (I can read and write them as fast as our own Roman alphabet), but Kanji is different. I don't mean because there are so many of them because that is no problem. Japanese is harder than Chinese because in Chinese, each Kanji is usually only read in one or two ways. Many Kanji in Japanese can have up to and over 10 readings. 明 is a doozy, my friend, and the readings all depend on context.

6. Japanese people cannot read other Japanese names at times, requiring furigana (small Hiragana over the Kanji to know how it's pronounced). This is because a Japanese name can be written with any Kanji one likes so as long as the readings match with what you want it to say. This produces the problem of many names having combined Kanji that could have over 50 ways of being pronounced.

There are many, many more, my friend. I don't want to tell you the easy part yet because the easy part comes AFTER you're grasped all of this. When you get to the point of Japanese where you can pronounce a Kanji and continue reading that you've never seen before (just by common sense in Japanese), then you've got it.