Japanese is anything but an easy language to learn, regardless of one's mother tongue. Still, it is one of the most popular foreign language choices in America and Europe, for two main reasons: the economical importance of Japan and the numerous businesses contracted between Japan and these areas and the fascination for Japanese culture that mainly formed up through modern Western media. Regardless of which reason you want to learn it for, the Japanese language cannot be learnt easily unless you know how it works.

Japanese is spoken by over 130 million people all over the world, obviously most of them being in Japan's mainland. The Japanese language's grammar is usually very complex to foreigners because it uses a specific speaker-listener status vocabulary that is unlike anything English or other western languages can offer. Another showstopper when learning Japanese is its writing style, which uses a combination of three alphabets: Chinese characters (also known as Kanji) and two syllabic scripts known as Katakana and Hiragana. In addition, modern Japan uses the Latin alphabet for more and more purposes, which makes it slightly easier for English speakers to grasp this new language than say, a hundred years ago.

There are plenty of great reasons to want to learn Spanish. Embarking on an adventure to a Spanish speaking country, falling in love with a Spanish speaking partner, hoping to advance your professional career by becoming bilingual, or just for the excitement of learning something new. Learning a foreign and exotic language like Spanish can have many benefits.

But where to begin, there are so many choices. Classroom study, while great for face to face learning, is not always convenient for the hectic lives we all lead. It requires extra time for traveling to and from classes, while having to arrange your schedule around class times someone else has determined. For the really dedicated and adventurous types, you can immerse yourself into a Spanish environment. You'll certainly learn, but packing up and moving to a different city or country, is just not practical for everyone. There is a better alternative.

If you're a native English speaker, or even if you simply know English well enough to be reading and understanding this article, learning German should prove to be a lot easier than for people speaking a different language. The reason for this is that German and English are closely related, they both have a Germanic, Anglo-Saxon background, with inherent touches of ancient roman glossary and some small Greek influences. The fact that English and German languages have a common root can be proven by the many cognate words (cognates are words that are closely similar in two or more languages) that they have in common. For example: haus and house (similar pronunciation) , braun and brown (similar pronunciation) or garten and garden (slightly different pronunciation) .

Some Absolutes:

1. Foreign Language courses are not like other courses you must never procrastinate. Procrastinationfiltered=failure in foreign language courses. Therefore you must spend a minimum of 15 minutes each day and a minimum of 3 hours a week. And additional time whenever possible. However, you should never spend more than 45 minutes studying the language in one session. Split your study up into several small sessions.

2. Class Attendance is mandatory and necessary in order to pass the course and learn the language.

3. Some occasional review of all material you have learned previously is also very important to your success. (for example, the vocabulary)

She insisted that her daughter not be penalized for misspellings--but spelling counts even out of the classroom, whether we like it or not. And millions don't like it, and it's no wonder. After all, English is not only loaded down with ninety spelling rules, they're accompanied by about 3,500 exceptions! And forget about spelling a word the way it sounds. The first lines of this poem prove that:

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough.
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, laugh and through . . .

I'll start by asking which of these words are correctly spelled. segue, dicotomy, bouillion, scissars, brouhaha, begger, shepard, lieutenent, calander, guaruntee. Are you sure? Remember that you can't look them up. This is a test--just like the ones your child takes in school. Answers come later; for now, it's enough if you're starting to sympathize with the spelling-challenged.