I have never been particularly good at learning foreign languages. I always have immense trouble in understanding how verbs and their modifiers work outside of English and, some of the time, French. In general, though, I just stay away from them. I'm much better with computer languages. Which is really sad, just ask Chris.

I took three years of Spanish in high school. I barely know any of it though. >.<

I've also been tempted to learn Japanese for a while now. I just haven't. Not sure why.

It's actually really nice how structural the language seems to be. Hiragana isn't too hard to pick up either. I think from learning, I've discovered how retarded English is.

I found a pretty cool site today called italki where the idea is to talk to someone studying your language while you're studying theirs. So you can go on and find Japanese people to chat to or some of them to even Skype with.

さよなら - there's also a tool in windows that allows you to type romaji and have hiragana or katakana output.

I've actually been meaning to start practicing Japanese. My lady friend can speak it and write some of it and whatnot and she's really convincing me to try to learn it since I desperately want to learn another language. Icelandic preferably, but it's so hard to find resources for it...

English is my main language, but I've been taking French for five years through school and plan to take a trip to France this summer. Other than that I know a little bit of Spanish, German, and Japanese due to an exploratory language class I took back in junior high.

I have heard that the Japanese language is a rather difficult to learn, considering that there are thousands of different symbols in the language, each with its own meaning.

Although, I do sometimes consider learning the language myself. It is always good to understand the background of someone's culture.

That's actually Chinese. Japanese typically uses 48 characters, known as Hiragana. There is a "cursive" form, which also has 48 characters known as Katakana, which is derived from Kanji (Chinese characters used for Japanese words). While Kanji does have thousands of symbols, they are very rarely used, and there have been laws passed limiting the number available for use in signs, newspapers, etc. to about 2000 of them. Even then, they usually display the Hiragana above or beside these characters for people who don't know them.

Ah, I see. Thank you for your provided information.

That makes the thought of learning Japanese much, much more relieving...

I've taken about four years of Spanish, with teachers from Spain, Ecuador, and the United States. (Granted, I have yet to come across an American instructor I've enjoyed learning the language from.) This past year was my final year taking Spanish. I had been planning to minor in it, but the instructor I had made me lose all motivation for it. Love the language itself, though.

Next semester I'm planning to go to Hong Kong, so I'll probably end up learning Cantonese. Should be rather interesting. I want to learn German and Japanese as well, but they'll have to come later, I suppose.