| I'm wondering if the main factor is one's ability to learn a new language - itself affected by many factors such as age, for example? I've been married to a native Japanese for going on 19 years now. I have tried to learn the language. I have lived in Japan for 6 years, hoping that full immersion would help. I even embarked in the Kumon Japanese course whilst in Japan, from beginner level to more advanced. I have piles and piles of the work books cluttering my home. I ended up being able to read katakana, hiragana, and learned some 250 Kanji. What I didn't end up managing was being able to have decent conversation in Japanese. Sure, I could ask for a beer, directions, talk about the weather, but that was about it. I had reached some plateau and could go no further. In the end I gave up. It was basically something I couldn't do. I tried many different ways of learning, found none which could not prevent my sheer frustration at not being able to take the knowledge in. Are some people simply 'wired' to learn language more than others? Is there an age limit, for example? Was it my low tolerance for frustration? Was it my perfectionist tendencies? Probably a 'yes' to most of those. But I stopped after more than a decade of trying. |