athena02

Might be just me, but watching subbed anime helps a lot at improving my vocabulary. At first, it didn't necessarily help. It was also pretty tough to read the subs while also concentrating on the series. But as time went on, I started catching words that got repeated often, and the subtitles were always a great help.

I've noticed that listening to Japanese music helps mostly in cementing your memory of words you already knew the meaning of. Then all you have to do is associate them with other words and look up their meanings. In the long run, this should help greatly with structuring sentences.

Well, to be fair the English language take a great place in the Japanese education. Its a mandatory subject up until they graduate from High School from what I've heard. Of course not all of them will focus on the language. So while some may be able to understand English, they won't necessarily be able to hold a conversation.

As stated by others, Google Translate is a good tool for online translations jobs. Of course it won't be perfect, and it will in fact have a lot of flaws. But if you are familiar with both languages, proofreading the translated text can be rather easy.

Just realized that I forgot to introduce myself, so here goes. My name is Helen, and I am originally from Australia. Fluent in both English, French and Mauritian Creole, I moved to Mauritius a couple of years ago, and am currently following a Journalism course there. Looking forward to interacting with other Linguaholic members, and hopefully find the motivation to learn a fourth language.

Lessons are good, but I believe that the best way to improve not only your fluency but also your accent is to have a French-speaking friend you can have conversations with. It helps a lot to actually have someone to listen to your pronunciation and help you improve it.

For me it was an obvious choice since I have a lot of family living in France. I often traveled there for vacations, and the decision of learning French just came to me naturally since it would have made it easier to talk to them, or even manage to go out on my own without acting like a clueless tourist I also love the language however, and also plan to learn Latin in the near future.

La Rue Cases-Nègres by Joseph Zobel was one of the first French Classics that I've read, and I loved every bit of it. Despite the serious theme, the narration managed to throw in a comedy tone now and then.