improve your speaking. If you don't have a native Japanese speaking friend to practice with, this can be difficult. The solution to this problem, is to talk to yourself. Look around you. What do you see? Do you see a window, a door, a person, a bird? If you know the name of it in Japanese, say it, out loud. Ask yourself, What am I doing? Think of as many things as possible: I am sitting, I am breathing, I am reading, I am thinking. Say it out loud. Ask yourself, What did I do yesterday? What will I do tomorrow? You must do this if you want to improve your speaking, you must speak. Japanese is Different Japanese is linguistically distant from English. This means there are almost no similarities and it is difficult for native speakers of each language to learn the other one. For example, it is easier for English speakers to learn Spanish or German because they are similar to English. Japanese people will have an easier time learning Korean, because the grammar is similar to Japanese. It is said that learning a European language can take about 500-600 hours of study, while Japanese takes about 1100-1200 hours of study. A lot of this is because of the writing system, but also the lack of similarity in the vocabulary. That being said, you're going to have to drastically change the way you think about language and how you express things in Japanese. Often times, simply knowing all the vocabulary and grammar of a sentence will not let you understand its meaning. One thing that is unique about Japanese, is that they drop every word from the sentence that can be understood from context. This is the reason why computer translations of Japanese are notoriously terrible, the computer doesn't understand the context of the situation. For example, the sentence: I am giving this to you, will just be one word, the verb ageru あげる[上げる](to give). This is because in this situation, it is understood who is doing the giving and receiving, and obviously someone is holding something in their hand and extending it outward, so we don't really need to say that, do we? Another thing you must get used to, is thinking backwards. Word order, verb placement, and clause position in Japanese is, for the most part, opposite that of