Actually, contrary to popular belief listening to music without lyrics (instrumentals) with a soft/calming melody can actually help you to work better whilst studying.

I’d reccommend taking the time to look up instrumentals of songs on YouTube and play them in the background whilst you study. I like to listen to a lot of J-Trance at a low volume.

Welcome to TextFugu, Chelsea!

I wish I had Japanese family members.
Your goal is very ambitious but if you work hard, I’m sure you will achieve it.

Good luck learning Japanese.

Wow, thank you for sharing this.

There’s a less than 1% chance I’ll go (if I am lucky enough to convince my Mum and Dad) but I’m going to try! ^_^

こんばんは。
私はアビーです。
よろしくお願いします。

1. No idea.

2. Isn’t 僕 the manly way to say I? I don’t know, perhaps this person is a guy trying to add emphasis on his ‘manliness’?

3. I don’t know about the 生まれた part but I know that 日 means day.

4. Use Google Translate. XD If that doesn’t qualify as an answer well I don’t know.

*looks around suspiciously* I never get involved in these things…hmm, looks like I’m finally wanting to try and learn something.

Her Japanese is really good, she seems to know a lot (I hate it when she says she’s not that good) and I agree with you on the studying part as studying has a broad range of meaning.

LOL.

@Mister, I’m afraid to say I was a complete beginner back then and I did Google Translate it. :P

For the past 3 years I’ve been learning French, German and Japanese and ALL of the language learning has suffered. Thankfully I no longer have to learn French or German so I’m able to focus completely on Japanese now.
I only know the Korean ‘alphabet’ and basic words. Korean (from what I’ve gathered) is a lot harder to grasp than Japanese but the learning of the ‘alphabet’ and words themselves are pretty easy. You can learn the whole ‘alphabet’ in a day as there are only 24 characters!

I hardly learn Korean (unfortunately) because I’m more into learning Japanese right now. Perhaps when I’m more advanced in learning Japanese I’ll dive into Korean as my dream is to be fluent in both of them languages but being advanced in Korean and fluent in Japanese is good enough for me. And reading all this I think I’m a bit ambitious. >.<''

Welcome to TextFugu, Ken!

I used to have 3 friends (who are all sisters) and they were all really interested in Japan and learning Japanese – I was close friends with the youngest sister but after a while she ‘converted’ to Korean and has stuck with Korean for the past 2 years.
I totally agree with you on how us English people expect foreigners to speak our language yet when we go to a foreign country we also expect the locals to speak English. Some of us are just (unfortunately) quite ignorant of other languages and culture.

The ‘language cast’ thing seems interesting and I’m happy you have something like that near you.

Good luck learning Japanese!