Quote:
Originally Posted by angelmod
the languages i speak are: german, french, arab, english + 2 arabic dialects.
btw: i know my english is a disaster  |
IN that case, my point sort of still does stand. And, no, your English is very good. I never would have assumed it wasn't your native language had your first post not had your location as "Germany" (and then I think there was one minor error that otherwise could have been chalked up to "accident"). Especially with phrases like "my English is a disaster," which sounds
very native.
Given that you live in Germany, I'm assuming you learned German as your native language and started studying English from a young age. It doesn't hurt that if you live far enough west in Germany, you'll naturally know some French, too. You might have even studied it in school for all I know.
Now Arabic + 2 Arabic dialects still stands up. I'm willing to guess you're ethnically Arab and this is why you speak at least one of these (and the other two were easy to learn, just like German->English is sort of easy and English->Dutch isn't too bad, either).
On the other hand, Japanese will be nothing like anything you've ever learned, and you're not learning it through absorption or in school like you have done before.
You need to mimic those two methods: use it as much as possible, and study it like you study languages in school.
Robinmask raised a good point about the writing systems, too. English, French, and German all share the same alphabet (with German merely having an extra one, ß). Arabic is a more difficult writing system than the Roman alphabet, but far easier than Chinese/Japanese.
So I want to point out to you that, in my experience, a significant hurdle to becoming good at speaking Japanese will be kanji. You'll hit a wall as an intermediate and spend years there unless you manage to learn 12–1400 kanji by then.
As for your current beginner status, I've said before to you: study it like you study any other subject in school: use it daily, read about it daily, do practice problems out of a textbook daily.