This is deep. If I truly understood this statement, I would not be who I am now. This statement applies to every study or discipline in life.

One thing that I might add is that drawing a line in the sand is extremely fun. You don’t even think about the tide because you are so immersed in the activity.

For those who are in college, finish all your core requirements and the core requirements for your degree before you take foreign language class. Foreign language class does eat a lot of your study time. Take the pressure off your back by finishing your core requirements.

I’m quite fond of your blog, by the way.

Will

I think you are currently doing all the right things in order to improve your Japanese in general. Regarding the problem of focus and not being able to say specifically what you want to say, might I suggest trying anyway perhaps in simpler terms and seeing if the other person can help you out with the necessary vocabulary and/or grammar? For instance, if you don’t know how to say “alimony”, you might ask 「離婚した後、離婚した人に毎月払わないといけないお金を何というの？」 (I don’t even know if they have anything like alimony in Japan, which I think is different from 慰謝料, so it’s an interesting question.) If possible, it would be even better to have the person write down the things you didn’t know so that you can take it home or you can punch it into an electronic dictionary and have it in the history function. (I usually always carry one around in my bag.)

I didn’t really ever practise my conversation before I came to Japan, and so during the first few weeks here I had a dramatic increase from hardly being able to speak/decipher what anyone else was saying, to being able to understand about 80% (it’s generally just a vocabulary problem) and being able to have interesting conversations with people. I think it’s because I already had all of the knowledge from all of the reading/writing which we did in lessons, I just had no idea how to process it so that I could speak.

I have however now reached a sort of lull in how much I’m improving, and I quite often feel frustrated when I know that I want to say something, but can’t work out the grammar or I don’t know the vocabulary required to say it. The problem is I think that there’s only so much preparation you can do for conversation, in that I almost never have any idea what I’m going to end up talking about on a certain day, so sometimes I am able to say everything that I want to, and sometimes I can’t say anything at all.

Do you have any advice on what to do to improve this? I’m trying to hang around with Japanese people as often as possible, I’m reading a novel in Japanese, I read my friend’s blogs on mixi, I write things occasionally (this is the one thing which I’m not doing a lot of focusing on because it’s not that important to me right now), but I feel like I’m missing out on doing something which would help me to retain stuff more easily.

Hmm! I really like your blog though, it’s always an interesting read.