Hello,
I appreciate the difficulties. When I came here, I had no Japanese except a vague sense of what certain terms used in the art I practice meant. (I later discovered that these terms were highly artificial and that some native Japanese did not know what they meant.) I took an intensive course in spoken Japanese, designed to cover the basic grammatical structure of the language and introduce students to the sound structure of Japanese. Since I was hearing Japanese all the time, this introduction was very useful. I then found two teachers. One was a colleague who taught me how to read the kana syllabaries and Chinese characters and the other was a student who focused on the spoken language. He provided a strictly monitored environment in which I could learn to speak the language. Living in the country gave me a major advantage: that I was hearing the spoken language all the time and thus constantly interacting with living language models.
A couple of my colleagues here are trying to learn Latin. One advantage is that there are two of them, which is much preferable to being a sole learner.
Best wishes,
Peter Goldsbury,
Forum Administrator,
Hiroshima, Japan