The Six hardest Languages for English Speakers

Learning any new language is difficult. However, some languages are MUCH MORE difficult than others, depending on your native language. A Spanish speaker will have an easier time speaking Italian than someone who speaks Hindi. A Klingon will have an easier time learning Kryptonian than learning Welsh. That’s (duh) because there are similarities in languages families and it’s easier to learn languages that are in the same family. So, if you (English Speaker) want to learn Spanish or German, that’s no big deal, the languages are pretty similar. However, if you’re up for a real challenge, there are languages completely unrelated to English that are fiendishly difficult for an English speaker to learn, for reasons you wouldn’t expect

Hint—Pig Latin is not on the list

6 Arabic

Spoken by 280,000,000 people in 26 different countries, including Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Morocco, Iraq, Israel, Syria, and Somalia; Arabic is the fifth most spoken language in the world. If you want to see the pyramids, religious historical relics, or a war zone, this is a good language to know.

What makes Arabic simple:

It uses an alphabetic system.

There are lots of classes you can take and textbooks you can use.

What makes Arabic migraine-inducing-ly difficult:

First, even though it uses an alphabet of only 28 letters, the letters have four different forms, depending on where they land in the sentence.

Ls, mst f th tm thy dnt ncld vwls n wrtng. Bcs fck y, thts wh.

Also, most of the time, they don't include vowels in writing. Because fuck you, that's why.

Secondly, the Modern Standard Arabic you’ll learn from textbooks, college courses, US Government Spy training, etc, is used only for writing and for watching the news. Each country or even area of a country has a different dialect. They SAY dialect, but they don’t mean cute pronunciation differences like the Weasley brothers have, they mean that these dialects can be completely un-intelligible to each other. The pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary of colloquial Arabic are all different from the Modern Standard Arabic you learned to read and write from your textbook. (What’s left to language after you change the pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary?)

“BODY Language….”

So, first you have to figure out where you want to go/who you’re going to need to talk to. Figure out what dialect they speak and then spend 2,200 class hours (double that to include homework time) reaching “general proficiency.” The Foreign Service Institute of the US Department of State has found that it takes 88 weeks of super intensive study (half that time spent in-country) for dedicated, high-aptitude language learners to become mostly proficient in Arabic. Conversely, they say it takes 23-24 weeks to reach that level in Italian or Norwegian and 30-36 weeks for Swahili. You could become competent in THREE other languages in the time it takes to reach the same level in Arabic.

Remember how French and Spanish have gender for each noun? It was sometimes hard to remember that extra little info, wasn’t it? Guess what, Arabic has that too! Also, each noun and verb must be learned not two, but three separate ways- singular, dual, and plural. In English we normally just tack an -s on the end of a noun and maybe turn the -y to –i for plurals, but sometimes we have totally different words, “I” versus “we” or “mouse” versus “mice.”

It would be like every noun changing three different ways—mouse, bimice and mice. Or maybe dualmice…

If Arabic gets too tough and you want to switch to Dutch, just remember that ageless proverb:

الخاذل أخو القاتل The deserter is the brother of the murderer.

5 Xhosa

Xhosa is spoken in South Africa and Lesotho by about 8 million people, including Nelson Mandela. Xhosa is related to languages spoken all over Africa, so if you want to travel throughout Africa, learning a new language every 300 hundred miles, why not start here? There are classes offered in South Africa if you care to move to Cape Town and you can get newspapers and magazines printed in Xhosa.

Xhosa is an “agglutinative” language which means that each word starts with a base and then you add prefixes or suffixes or infixes to add meaning. Do we do this in English too? Abso-fucking-lutely! (Well…abso-fucking-not-really would be more accurate.) Sure, we add prefixes, and we add suffixes, but, like the example above, the f-bomb is about the only in-fix we have. Xhosa also has four different tones and 18 different click sounds. In fact, the name of the language begins with a click sound that sounds kind of like the click we use when we want horses to go a little faster.

Xhosa also has 15 noun classes. This means that when you learn a new noun, you need to learn which of 15 categories it belongs to. Is it an abstract thought like justice? Then it fits in noun class 14. Is it a loan word from a different language like computer? Then it goes in noun class 9. Noun classes affect things like which pronoun you use with the noun, how you make it plural, how it works together with the verb and so forth. So after you learn each word, you have to figure out which noun class it fits into and what other changes you have to make to the sentence based on that.

Finally, numbers can be hard. I’ll just leave you with a few examples.

66 amashumi amathandathu anathandathu amashumi amathandathu anesithandathu 24 amashumi amabini anane amashumi amabini anesine 56 amashumi amahlanu anathandathu amashumi amahlanu anesithandathu 4 Japanese

Japanese is spoken in Japan by about 125,000,000 people, including Ichiro and Pikachu. Its writing system is ridiculously hard. There are two different alphabets (adding up to 96 letters), in addition to the characters which make up the main base of writing. There will be lots more to say about the difficulty in learning to read characters further on, but first-

What makes it easy: It is pretty easy to pronounce, has very few irregular verbs (not like English: swim, swam, swum), and there are countless textbooks, learning CDs, and teachers to teach it.

How’s it hard?

The pronunciation has a key difference from English that we didn’t even know existed. Based on how long you say the vowel in a word, the meaning changes. Beru is building while beeru is beer and obaasan is grandmother and obasan is aunt. Try picking those differences out when you’re in the middle of a conversation.

Turns out lots of languages are agglutinative, and Japanese is no exception. They pack lots of meaning into a single word, expressing the idea, “if (subject) had been made to work…” by saying, “hatarakaseraretara...”

However, the thing that trips up most people is the honorific language. In Japan, being polite occupies about 90% of your waking hours. Verbs change completely depending on if you’re talking to a close friend or your boss. There are something like 6 levels of politeness, and the second trickiest part is knowing when to use which one. You can’t talk to your boss the same way she talks to you, because you’re at different status levels. Women and men have different ways of speaking (guess which gender speaks more politely?) Plus, you can hurt a close friend’s feelings by speaking too politely, therefore implying that you’re not actually all that close. They take this stuff so seriously that you can actually take a night course to learn the exact proper degree of bowing.

“You’re fired.”

The words change a lot depending on which level of politeness you’re going to use. For example, the past tense of the verb to read changes from its most causal form, yonda, to its most formal form oyomininarimashita. Sometimes you have to use completely different words, like changing ashita (tomorrow) to myounichi (tomorrow, but nicer).

Besides the fine arts of paper folding and really weird porn, they have also mastered the art of both and indirect speech in Japan. You’ll never hear the word no. You’ll rarely hear people say what they honestly think. If you ask someone to come to your house for dinner with friends, they might say, “Oh, don’t you think it’s too much trouble to make dinner for so many people?” You’ll insist, “No! I like having people over!” They’ll mention, “Won’t it be hard to find your place?” “No, no, no,” you’ll say, “there’s a bus stop right in front of the apartment building.” They might have to work late that day… “Whenever you can come by, come!” you’ll say warmly. At this point, they trip and fall over… and you might finally realize that what they’re actually saying is, “Hey, dumbass, I’ve made it abundantly clear I’m not coming! Stop pushing it. Can’t you understand Japanese?”

3 Navajo

Navajo is spoken in the southwest United States by about 170,000 people, including Keith Little: a decorated Code Talker who fought in the Marshall Islands, Sai Pan, and Iwo Jima. Read more about the code talkers at http://www.navajocodetalkers.org.

Navajo has four tones: high, low, rising, and falling, and these can each be pronounced either normal or nasalized. (Don’t get a cold when you’re trying to speak Navajo.) Navajo has a shit-ton of verbs, despises nouns, and doesn’t use adjectives at all.

Navajo is an endangered language. In fact, only three percent of Navajo speakers are monolingual. Lots of people care about it, so there are bilingual schools to preserve the language, and Rosetta Stone recently completed a language program so you can learn it at home.

The fun thing about Navajo is that verbs are all important and change all the time. You can’t just say, “sit,” you have to think ahead about WHAT is sitting. If people sit, it’s sidá, if something round or square is sitting, you use si’ą́, and if something flat and flexible is sitting, you use siłtsooz.

Also, unlike Japanese that borrows words like computer (konpyuta) and beer (beeru), Navajo rarely does that. Navajo creates new words describing the term. A cell phone is called “the thing you stand up on the hill with” and an army tank is a “car that one sits up on that crawls around with a thing on it that makes big explosions” (chidí naa’na’í bee’eldǫ́ǫ́htsoh bikáá’ dah naaznilígíí.) Also, since they rarely use nouns, instead of calling most anything one person sits on a chair, they describe by how it’s used, so it can be, “bikáá’ dah ’asdáhí (“one sits up there on it”) or bikáá’ na’anishí(“one works on it”),”

2 Cantonese

Cantonses is spoken in Southern China, the city of Hong Kong and elsewhere by about 20 million people.

What makes it easy: Nothing. We’re pretty high on the difficulty list here.

Why it’s hard: The main problem that gets people who are learning Cantonese are the tones. There are six tones: high, low-middle to high, middle, low-middle to low, low to low-middle, and low-middle.

So, when you learn a new word, you have to also learn the tone, and you’ve got to hit it just right, because the middle and low-middle tones are close but crucially different. If you say something with the wrong tone, it’s a big deal. Maii (low to low-middle) means buy. Maii (low-middle) means sell. Also, tou (low to low-middle) ngo (low-middle) means hungry while tou (low to low-middle) ngo (high) means diarrhea.

Also, have you ever tried looking up a picture in a dictionary? Let’s say you’re reading a book and you come across a word you don’t recognize. Let’s say it’s this one.

黐線

How exactly do you go about finding one of those characters in the dictionary? There’s no alphabet, so if you don’t already know the character, you don’t know how to pronounce it. Well, I’ll tell you how, but it’s a pain in the ass. First, you have to figure out the “key,” a little section of the character. There are 214 keys and every character will have at least one key in it. Then you have to figure out how many brush strokes it would take to write this key… if you’re writing it in calligraphy. Then count how many strokes for the whole character. Then you look in the key index in the dictionary for the key under the correct number of brush strokes, then go to the right page for that key, then search under the key according to the number of brush strokes for the whole character, then look through all the samples until you find the character you’re looking for. For a beginner, it can take over ten minutes to look up a single word and often times, they are actually unable to look up the word at all because as a beginner, you don’t know which part of the character is the “key” and you don’t know how many brush strokes it takes to write each key. Then you realize that most words are made of two characters and you might need to look up both of them separately and find the right combination.

1 Tuyuca

Tuyuca is spoken in the Eastern Amazon and has less than a thousand speakers. It- obviously- doesn’t have a Rosetta Stone option, and there aren’t any textbooks for learning it. If you want to learn Tuyuca, you have to move to Columbia or Brazil and live on the shores of the river with the indigenous people who speak it. It’s a bit more difficult than practicing Spanish when ordering tacos at the van that drives right up to your house. What kind of language is it? It’s “a postpositional agglutinative SOV language with mandatory type II evidentiality.” Geuh…..

Because it’s agglutinative like Japanese, the one word hóabãsiriga means “I do not know how to write.” It also has two different words for “we.” One that means us and not you, and one that means us and you too. This could help clear up some confusion in English.

“WE’RE going to the movies tonight.

Finally, remember how Xhosa had 15 noun classes? Well, Tuyuca has somewhere between 50 and 140. One of the more obscure noun classes is the class that means, “bark that does not cling closely to a tree.” This can also apply to baggy pants, or wet peeling plywood.

As for pronunciation, it has two tones and the meaning of the word changes whether you say it nasalized or not… but you’ve already got tones and nasalization mastered from Navajo and Cantonese.

And last, but not least, remember the last time you had to write a paper and you had to painstakingly cite all your sources? Well, if you want to speak Tuyuca, you better get used to citing every thought you want to express. Tuyuca has obligatory endings on its sentences that state HOW you know what you’re saying. You can’t just say, “That dude is a douchebag.” You’ve got to say-

“That dude is a douchebag” + any of the following 5 verb endings:

+ because I saw him kick that puppy (visual sensory).

+ because I can smell his Axe body spray from here (nonvisual sensory).

+ because his friends are douchebags (inferential).

+ because my friend told me (reportative).

+ because I have seen other douchebags who have also bleached the tips of their hair (assumed).

JLPT 4

I just finished taking a big Japanese language test. It’s called the JLPT, and I took level 4. It’s a pretty expensive test. Between the test fee and the postage to mail in the test application, it cost about 7,000 Yen. That’s about 90 US dollars. I’m hoping to get a job teaching English at a Japanese University pretty soon, so being able to pass a Japanese test would look pretty good on my resume. Now, there are 5 levels, the 1^st level proving that you are fluent, and the 5^th level showing that you have probably studied two semesters worth at college. (As anyone who has studied a foreign language can attest to, two semesters doesn’t add up to very much language ability, much less when you have to spend half that time just learning to read...and not getting very far on that anyways.)

So, I took level 4 on December 4^th 2011. I began planning to take the test in May, 2011. In May, I went to the JLPT website and answered the sample questions they provide on the website for level 5 (http://www.jlpt.jp/e/samples/forlearners.html). I passed with flying colors. I failed the level four questions spectacularly. However, the test wasn’t for another seven months. I study about twleve hours or more a week, so I figured I could level up in that amount of time. I study from the textbook series called Genki. I mostly focused on just working my way through that textbook. It’s a great textbook series that combines all four skills (speaking, listening, reading, writing), in order to create a well-rounded Japanese speaker. I figured that it would just as adequately prepare me for the test as anything else would. I felt that my listening skills were pretty good, as were my reading and writing skills, but that I needed more work on my grammar. (Specifically, particles, for any Japanese speakers out there)

About two months before the test, I started looking online and found some practice tests. I took them and aced the reading portion with flying colors. I did acceptable on the grammar section and got a...wait for it.... 0 on the listening section. Yes. ZERO.

See, the test doesn’t just hand you the answers. A sample question was something like,

Listen to the dialogue-

Girl: Why were you so late today?

Boy: I had problems on the bus.

Girl: What happened? Did you oversleep?

Boy: No, when I got off the bus, I realized I had left my wallet on my seat!

Girl: Oh! I thought you were going to say you forgot your wallet at home.

Boy: No, I didn’t forget my wallet at home.

Question: Why is he late?

A-He slept in and missed the bus.

B-He left his wallet at home.

C-He left his wallet on the seat of the bus.

For someone like me who can only pick out words here and there, this is a pretty tricky question! When I hear the choices, it’s hard to pick which one is best, because I heard the main parts of each sentence. So I picked B, because I heard about him leaving his wallet at home more than anything else. In the test making business, we call those types of questions “distractors,” and I should know better than to fall for them, but I did every time. That’s why I did worse than if I had just marked random answers.

So I immediately started focusing on my listening skills. I listened to Japanese on my phone as I biked to and from school, I watched Japanese TV at home and YouTube tutorials, and I started feeling more confident. I found a different listening sample test and scored 60% on it! (50% is a passing grade.) I continued studying, but I felt very confident that I would pass the test. From time to time Jon would give me five minute tutorials in Japanese grammar or reading as we were grocery shopping or waiting for the bus. For example, he taught me how to remember the difference between the very similar looking kanji for “to wait” 待, “to hold”　持, and “especially” 特.　

Now we’re up to the month before the test. I stop learning new things, and go back and review everything that I’ve studied up to this point. It’s a textbook and a half of review, and I’m glad I did it. There were plenty of vocabulary words I had forgotten and important grammar issues I had totally forgotten about.

The Friday before the test, I do one last online practice test, just a short one on grammar. I, again, get a big, fat, ZERO. Again, worse than if I had just marked all Bs. I then go to the list of kanji (Japanese characters)I need to know and realize that I don’t know lots and lots of them. I know about 250 from my textbook, and the test requires 280, so, since they only require 50% to pass, I figured I was in the clear. Well, my textbook did not teach me the same ones the Japanese test makers think I should know.

At this point I’m much less confident. I don’t know the right kanji, my grammar skills are non-existent, and I’m pretty sure I WON’T pass. I spend all day Saturday and Sunday morning skimming the new kanji so I can recognize them, and reviewing more grammar (particles!).

The test starts at 12:30 on Sunday, and by 12:15, almost everyone is in the room, ready to start. We have assigned seats, and we clear our desks of everything except our test voucher, a few pencils, an eraser, and a watch. The administrator walks up and down the row checking our faces to our test photo and handing out the question packet and answer sheet. At 12:45, we finally begin.

I am glad that I spent that last few days in review. Almost everything I reviewed is somewhere on that first portion of the test. There are 30 minutes and 35 questions, and the kanji part is relatively easy. I answer all the questions that I’m sure I know first, then count them. There are 18 questions that I’m almost positive I got right. That’s half. That’s passing! I finish the test, guessing on the rest of them, but making pretty good guesses, I think. I walk out of the room with a smile on my face. I notice that lots of people aren't smiling. In fact, I glance around once we've done, "pencils down!" and I notice that lots of people didn't have watches with them. They must not have known that the time was up, because plenty of people have questions with no hole at all filled in.

Jon was waiting for me outside of the building, as he went with me to the testing area to support me. He had walked to McDonald’s and gotten me a cheeseburger and a coffee to keep me from getting hungry or sleepy. He’s wonderful. One of the questions had been to correctly identify the kanji for “to wait,” so I chalk that up to him.

I felt really good going back in to take part two. It was a 60 minute reading portion. I’m a good reader, and my reading skills have transitioned pretty easily in my other language (Spanish). I got stellar scores on my practice reading tests. I love reading.

I still love reading…

.......in English.

Boy, this part of the test kicked my butt. It started with the classic Japanese test question, where they take a sentence, break it into four pieces, jumble it up, and you have to put it in order. I’m very bad at this. When I see my middle school students doing these types of questions in English, I struggle to help them figure it out….in my own language. So, I figured I would skip those, and go to the reading passages. Well, those took a long time. One reading question would focus on one paragraph of reading. So, in order to answer one reading question, I had to read a full paragraph of Japanese, then read the question and the multiple choices, another five sentences in Japanese. Just for one question. I read as quickly as I could, even skimming some reading sections, and I still had to guess on about 8 questions, just filling them in randomly. I did not leave with a smile.

There was another half hour break where Jon and I went for a relaxing walk and he talked me up, and then I went in to take the listening section. I don’t know, it’s all a blur by this point. Maybe I got 50%? There were only three multiple choices to choose from for about half the questions, so that really helped pull my random guessing score to 33% rather than 25%.

I had a hard time with this test because of its 50% pass rate. I’m used to the US, where 70% is usually the pass rate. When you walk out of a test, you know whether you knew most of the answers, so you know if you passed or not. But here, you could conceivable only know 35% of the answers, guess randomly on the remaining 65%, get 25% of those right, just from random guessing, and still pass the test! Knowing my track record of guessing, I’m not betting on that, but I still don’t know.

Also, I won’t find out if I passed till I get my results in the mail in Feb, two months after taking the completely scan-tron test. What, are they going to check them by hand? And then deliver them by carrier pigeon?

Reading in English class

A while ago I was watching an English teacher teach new words to some beginning English students. These students had a vocabulary of about 25 English words and had just mastered writing the alphabet a week earlier. Now, they were repeating after the teacher and looking at various phrases in the book, Good morning, Nice to meet you, and Are you from America? They were also studying additional individual words like, Canada, I’m, and not.

The students were looking at the phrases or words and repeating after the teacher as they attempted to learn to read these words. Three weeks later, most of them still couldn’t read (much less understand) the simple phrase, I’m not from Canada. Why? They had worked so hard! They had reviewed and repeated and completed about 18 workbook pages involving those very words! What could be wrong?

First, the students had no knowledge of phonics. They had learned to write the alphabet, say the ABCs, and they had learned one word which correlated to each letter, for example, A/Ant, C/Car, or I/ Ink. As far as I’ve seen, the teachers don’t even mention th, ch, and sh.

Second, the students were never (and have never to this date in any classroom I’ve observed) been asked to read something on their own. They ALWAYS listen to the teacher pronounce it before they are asked to “read” it.

Finally, they were exposed to very little actual English. An entire class period might revolve around learning only four new words. Another class period might involve only a minute grammar point. The language of the classroom is 95% Japanese. There were no stories, songs, picture books, etc. to expose the students to more English.

The problems with this style of learning are clear. The letter/word correlation is not all that helpful. In their first unit, they learn A makes the sound for Ant….then they learn that A makes a completely different sound for the words in Are you from America? The I in Nice to meet you, isn’t pronounced like the one in Ink, the C isn’t pronounced like the C in Car. Furthermore, the ABCs is a pretty outdated and detrimental way of teaching letter-sound correspondence. Although the letter D does make the d sound, the letter Y rarely makes a Y (why) sound. How can students be expected to figure out that H generally doesn’t make an ech sound, or that Window isn’t pronounced double u-indo-double u?

Another problem is that students are never asked to actually read a new passage without first hearing it pronounced. Therefore, they never build the ability to actually read something on their own. Even students in their third year of studying English struggle to read familiar vocabulary rearranged into a new sentence. The students are never asked to, “sound it out,” a phrase most western adults remember from their elementary school days. In fact, the idea of trying to read a new word through guessing at each letter’s sound is completely foreign. Students never learn phonics rules like, tion is pronounced shun, that a C followed by E makes the S sound, and they never see lists of words, like cat, mat, hat, pat, to drill the at sound.

Now, some teachers (who teach English to native English speakers) nowadays are actually doing much less phonics in the classroom to teach students to read. They believe that there are too many exceptions to the rule when it comes to English language spelling. It’s true, for every rule you can teach about phonics, there are a dozen words that are exceptions to the rule. It’s very confusing. So these teachers instead expose the student to LOTS of written media and expect the students to just figure it out. The students are read massive amounts of books, they listen to books on tape, they practice reading new text aloud in groups, they are encouraged to try to write prodigiously, even if the spelling is wrong, etc etc etc. This method has some very promising results. However, you may have noticed that the English Language Learners I work with are not exposed to all that much English. They cover two pages a week in their text book and three or four pages in their workbook. A page opened at random in the middle of the first year textbook has 18 English words on it. The workbook is about the same. That is simply not enough exposure to English to help the students learn to read.

So WHY? Why are the teachers teaching it this way? Didn’t THEY have to learn to read? Don’t they know how ineffective this all is?

Then…then…then it all came together one day when I saw the students copying kanji (Japanese characters) in their notebooks for Japanese class. The English teachers here are teaching English reading the same way they learned Japanese reading. In Japanese they do have an alphabet, but starting in first grade they begin learning the characters that make up the bulk of written text. A Japanese high school graduate knows about 2,000 kanji. Each character has to have its pronunciation memorized. You can’t “sound out” a character as you can a word written with an alphabet. You have to learn the kanji through rote memorization. ..much like the teachers are teaching each new English word as something that needs to be learned through rote memorization.

They are limiting their students’ English potential by inferring that new English words are learned the same way a kanji is! Their students are left thinking that if they don’t recognize the word from sight, they don’t know it. Period.

Language Difficulty Scale

I used to think that it was a bit stupid when people would say, "Oh this particular language is sooo hard to learn."

ALL languages are hard! It takes lots of work to learn ANY language! All languages have their own unique traits and complex grammar structures and pronunciation difficulties. And yeah, some languages are a little easier or harder than others depending on your native language, but it shouldn't make too much of a difference.

So I always thought lists like the following one http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers

were pretty bunk.

The website lists languages in order of difficulty for English speakers.

Afrikaans, Dutch, and Spanish are listed as some of the easiest languages, taking only 600 class hours to reach "General Professional Proficiency in Speaking and General Professional Proficiency in Reading (R3)."

Bosnian and Nepali are in level two, taking 1100 class hours to achieve the same competency....and Japanese falls under level three. It says that it should take "88 weeks (2200 class hours)(about half that time preferably spent studying in-country)" to get to a level three speaking and reading ability.

I am much more of a believer now that certain languages are MUCH harder then others for English speakers. For example, I believe that Japanese is almost four times harder for me than Spanish was. I half-assed learning Spanish for two years in high school. I took one semester in college, then four years later I moved to Ecuador. Within three months of living there, I was pretty good. I felt comfortable going to the immigration office, renting an apartment, meeting new people, having conversations about the upcoming elections, and telling jokes. It helped that my boyfriend and I spoke Spanish to each other and I was taking 10 hours of Spanish classes per week, but it really wasn't that hard!

I assumed that when Jon and I moved to Japan, I would pick up Japanese pretty much following the same time-scale. I knew that reading and writing would take longer to master, but speaking and listening should be ok, especially since Japanese and Spanish pronunciation is actually pretty similar (in the global scheme of languages). I work in a Japanese speaking environment and I study about 90 minutes a day. I've been here 8 months now, so that's about 500 hours of study. Now, those are hours spent studying on my own, not in a a formal classroom setting, but as a language teacher myself, I feel that my time studying is spent as productively as possible. I go to Japanese class once a week and I also meet with a language exchange partner to practice conversation once a week.

However, I find myself still struggling to express myself in the simplest way. I can't understand people even when they are trying to speak slowly and use basic words. I can't put the words I know together to form a comprehensible sentence.

Today I made an appointment using Japanese at a clinic and it was a pretty nerve-wracking, but successful experience. At least, I think it was successful, I'll find out Monday at 3:00 if my name is actually on the list.