Originally posted by Eternal-fire:
I am taking French but it's kinda complicated since you dun pronounce words as how you write them. And the nouns, verbs and stuff is kinda confusing.
Wait till you see German or Russian. The grammar will kill you.
As for TS, which language do you have a better command of? English or Chinese? (assuming your mother tongue is Chinese)
If Chinese, then there'll be one less hurdle for you in Japanese, which is Kanji. But you still have kana and the grammar (totally different from Chinese) to contend with. Bear in mind though, that not all Kanji in Japanese have the same meaning as in Chinese. I spent about 3 years self-studying Japanese and speaking Japanese around my friends who take it as a third language. And even so, my spoken Japanese is just passable, but it's quite fluent. My written japanese is tons better.
For Korean, they hardly use Hanja (Korean equivalent of Kanji) anymore, except in calligraphy. You'll need to master Hangul, which is an alphabet system of its own, and it's really not easy; I can tell from my experience. However, as you go deeper, you'll realize how similar some Korean words are used and pronounced as in Chinese. For any East Asiatic languages, Chinese helps a lot.
For French, keep in mind that English has borrowed a lot of words and vocab from French. However, the grammar is very complex compared to English, because you have case inflections, noun genders, article inflections. Moreover, the pronunciation is confusing, as the words are not spelt as they are pronounced, unlike English, which does that to a small extent.
As with any language, practice is the key. Listen to it more often. Speak it to yourself when you're alone. Write it often, such as when recording phone numbers or 4D. Read it online more often too. If you're better at it after a while,
think in that language.
It took me four years to get to H2 German standard(doing it now in JC), and three years to hold a proper conversation in Japanese. It's not an overnight thing.