Hello everybody!
I need to say this first, I miss you guys!! And guess what? I am writing from home, I mean my real home, in MALAYSIA! It has been two weeks since I left Japan, but so much has been going on, it feels like just yesterday!
Anyway, back to the poll, I put mine 4 years. The second foreign language I know is Japanese. Well, I spent 2 years learning Japanese from zero, in Malaysia. We spent 4 hours everyday for solely Japanese and the rest of the time for other subjects, also in Japanese. Man, that was crazy. For Mathematics, it was still OK but for subjects that needed reading?
Anyway somehow we survived and by by that time I had past the Japanese Profiency test Level 2, with level 1 the best.
The problem was, when I came to Japan, I couldn’t speak! At least not without constructing sentences in my mind first. And understanding professors was the worst part. I even asked one professor to slow down a bit and he told me I was not the only one attending the class, which was true.
What he said, but I still agree with me. (Kidding!)
I realized one thing about listening, I only had trouble listening to male speakers. The voice and the speed, were just infeasible. And that was a major problem because all my classmates and professors were male! Lucky me, haha.
So what I did was, make friends! Most were very, very shy but many were very cool and oh, such great helpers! They helped me get all the latest songs, for listening and Manggas to make me more familiar with everyday expressions ( which was very hard for me to finish because I don’t enjoy comics,so I switched to Magazines).
I did this the first year in Japan and I did improve. In terms of listening and speaking. I socialized more, joining the Foreign Students’ Association of my university, and other clubs. Also, I refused to speak English because it interfered with my perfecting my Japanese skill.
All the pleasure ended when my studies got tougher. So I my social life was restricted to only in the campus, which was not bad because I still got to socialize with most of my friends.
Also no matter how easy and comfortable I feel with this language I still make mistakes.