Oh no, French is really hard!! I’m sure I have no talent in learning French. My French friend will stay my home for a year from July, so I have a chance to learn French from him, but I’m not sure if I can speak it in the future. English is really easy!

Well, actually I have stopped at some point on the slope now, so I may be so much behind with my own English study.

I’m looking forward to your new posts and of course, I’ll be back! (Terminater? )

Thanks for stopping by and commenting. I noticed on your lang-8 profile that you’re also studying French now. Do you notice it being a lot easier than when you started studying English?

I like the way you phrase your explanation to your students. The imagery has an immediate impact.

Hope to see more comments from you again in the future!

I’m Rieko from lang-8.

Joshua, don’t worry, I was there, too, though my case was the opposite. I always translated English sentences into Japanese, and when I wrote essays, I wrote them in Japanese first and then translated them. It changed suddenly when I had to write a graduate thesis in English. Maybe I had no time to think in Japanese then, but I guess I already got to a certain level because of my effort.

As Alex says, so much exposure will definitely help you. In my case, I live in Japan and never studied abroad, so I tried to make my environment only with English, from TV, music, books, and so on. Of course I was working in a Japanese hospital, exposure to Japanese was far more than English. But whenever I watched TV news, dramas, or movies, I was shadowing English. Sometimes I was talking like Julia Roberts, sometimes I was talking like Johnny Depp, etc!

Also… I always tell my students (I’m an English teacher) that learning a foreign language is just like climbing up a very gentle slope in roller skating shoes. So if you stop at some point, you go down. But if you keep waking, and sometimes running up, you’ll find yourself at a higher level than before. Then… one day, you’ll find that you always think in Japanese, and when you write in Japanese, you make sentences without any help from your mother tongue. The more you study, the more you get the images and the words matched.

Now I feel much better writing in English than Japanese, though I still make lots of mistakes.

Oh, I also add that chatting with your Japanese friends will help you get quick response, even if it is just text chatting.

Anyway, good luck!