I fell in love with Japanese because of its sounds, and oddly enough, because of the not-so-small number of loan words from English. "Furaido- po-te-to-" was admittedly fun to say as well. It took nearly ten years of in-class studying for me to visit Japan, and I finally did in 2015 as an exchange student at the university I would later graduate from. Most of my friends in college were Japanese, and I have been told I communicate quite naturally. I then went on to work for another 4 years...
I fell in love with Japanese because of its sounds, and oddly enough, because of the not-so-small number of loan words from English. "Furaido- po-te-to-" was admittedly fun to say as well. It took nearly ten years of in-class studying for me to visit Japan, and I finally did in 2015 as an exchange student at the university I would later graduate from. Most of my friends in college were Japanese, and I have been told I communicate quite naturally. I then went on to work for another 4 years after that in the country as an instructor, translator, interpreter, etc. The year I graduated from college, I achieved the N1 certification of the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test), without studying specifically for the test.
I spent three years teaching English to groups of Japanese students, in the Japanese language. My approach to teaching Japanese is to build a foundation with vocabulary and characters, and immersing in low-level Native content in Japanese. Ideally, you would do this with material that you would love to read or watch in your native language, or have already consumed in your native language. I have found that Music, Films, Literature, etc. are great ways to engage your mind and more easily make language-learning into a habit. The key, I find, is to not worry about where you are at on your language learning journey, but to use what you can and understand what you can, and to explore continuously.
