Re: Well done Liam...
I was never really a language person at school.
In my early 20s, I met a girl and ended up moving to Taiwan for couple of years. I remember at the beginning chatting to an American guy who to me seemed to speak really good Chinese. I said to him I didn't think I'd ever learn, because it was so difficult.
He said something which I never forgot. How can it be difficult when over a billion people speak it? Even the stupid people in China can speak Chinese. But I said, well, that's because they learned it as kids. To which he said, looking at it another way, even stupid *kids* in China can speak Chinese.
Turns out, it's actually rather easy. No tenses, no verb conjugations, no plurals.
Everyone has the capability to learn languages. There is nothing inherently difficult that is beyond the brainpower of anyone. It's not calculus.
I ended up getting pretty fluent in Chinese in about 18 months.
The important things:
1. Speak it. You will make mistakes. But unless you just keep doing it, you will never get fluent. Like playing a musical instrument, you just have to keep on doing it or you will never get good.
2. Get in a class with a teacher who doesn't speak English. If your teacher explains things in English, you'll ask questions in English, and so will everyone else. After a year, you'll have learned quite a lot *about* the language, but you'll have learned virtually zero of the language. It's impossible to learn when you keep flipping back to English because trying to explain your question in Chinese is difficult. But if you don't force yourself to do that, you have no hope of doing it in the wild when you have someone who *doesn't* speak English.
3. If you're single, get yourself a girlfriend who doesn't speak English. I was in my mid 20s in Taiwan, I realized pretty quickly that the pool of English speaking girls was pretty small. A little bit of Chinese, and suddenly the pool was much bigger. There is nothing that motivates you to learn like hormones.
I ended up marrying a Brazilian, moving to Portugal and now have to speak yet another language. But after doing German and Chinese, I knew what I was in for, and even in my 40s, I can get by now though it's definitely a little harder now.
If you don't think it's in you, you're wrong. Those people who go to jail in Thailand end up fluent in Thai in six months. It's all about necessity. If you put yourself in a position where you need to speak it to survive and no one around you speaks English, you'll be amazed at how quickly you'd learn.