I’m from Vietnam. I’ve been in the UK for 10 years now. When I met my English husband 13 years ago at 19 I knew 0 English. We communicated using machine translation. So that’s when I started learning English. Fast forward to present day after immersion, living in an English speaking country, formal study, etc. and I’d say my writing and listening (understanding) are good, but my speaking and reading are still bad. I kind of gave up on trying to become fluent at this point.
May I ask which language you’re learning? I’m curious about Japanese and Arabic (Egyptian Dialect). But both seem really tough to learn.
I’m fluent in English and Spanish, et je suis en train d’apprendre le français
Though I will note that of course, learning a language that’s in the same “family” of languages as your mother tongue will always be easier, regardless of age. The jump to Japanese or Arabic from English is far greater.
Dutch is my native language so not sure how close that is to Japanese, ha. But I understand what you mean.
At the risk of coming off as too gatekeep-y, Arabic is structurally so different from English and French (the other two languages I know). It has a reputation for being difficult for a reason.
Despite it being my native language I’ll occasionally still think of an idea phrased primarily in English, and contorting it into Arabic is very clunky (despite Arabic being much more loosey goosey with word order, in general, you can figure out how to tie up an idea as you go - this applies more to MSA, dialects usually sway more towards a small number of forms).
While strictly more rigid, you might be better off at least grasping the basics of MSA first before jumping into a specific dialect. It is antithetical to how I think about languages (go learn the specific prescriptive form of Arabic instead of the most commonly spoken popularly developed one) but it might be easier to learn that way.
(I’m thinking of it like learning piano (or MIDI?) as a baseline for music and more instruments vs learning guitar first and having an understanding of notes and scales that is very closely associated to the relational positioning of these notes on these strings.)
Or maybe it might not be easier that way. I didn’t learn Arabic as an adult with a background in western languages, fuck if I know what the pedagogically optimal way to learn Arabic is. Arabic is hard, dude. Doesn’t help that half of all Arabic media is (I say this as an Arab) embarrassing mindless drivel.
Speaking Japanese honestly isn’t too hard. Reading/writing Japanese is more difficult but is easier as you realize the complex Kanji are just combinations of simpler kanji and how those relate to meaning. Most of the sounds are also in English.