I’m actually learning Spanish right now! I’m still at a pretty basic level, but I’m trying to practice little by little whenever I can. I totally relate to the time struggle though 😭 it’s hard to stay consistent when life gets busy.

way to go learning Japanese!

This is totally random, but I'm a Japanese translator. If you have questions, I'm happy to answer some (obviously not going to do full on lessons, but I could talk about Japanese for ages xD). I'm also not sure how much we can use other languages on Subeta, sometimes these sites have rules against that since they can't moderate what's said in other languages...

And I'm going to be brutally honest, but Japanese for Busy People is one of my least favorite Japanese text books ^^; I suppose it has its uses, but I find it teaches things in a very different way from most other resources, making it hard to understand all other resources.

oo that's interesting!! i'm actually the opposite, i find reading japanese in romaji really annoying DFGHJKL but man yeah the way japanese changes so much depending on formality is so fascinating to me!! italian has something similar (but to a much smaller extent) where if you're being polite instead of using 'you' when talking to someone you'd use the third person pronoun instead (and conjugate verbs accordingly)

as far as dictionaries go i personally like jisho and use it a lot! i eventually want to move to a japanese-only dictionary but i'm nowhere near that point yet LMAO i also use the yomitan extension on firefox to quickly look up words i don't know which is really handy :>

oo that's so cool!! did you study japanese in university or are you self-taught? also yeah, i'm not a huge fan of japanese for busy people either DFGHJKL like tbf i think it could work for some people? but at least for me just the amount of romaji is really off-putting, and there's only a handful of kanji right at the end and they're just the numbers lol........ but then again my copy is the 1994 edition, maybe more recent ones are better ( ᐛ )و

I started trying to teach myself when I was in high school, but I didn't get very far because I didn't really know how to study a language. I then studied it in university (just for fun at first) but didn't have any plans on being a translator, that just sort of happened later!

And yeah, the romaji is a bit annoying >< It can be a bit of a crutch, and once you can read hiragana, reading romaji is painful, and once you can read kanji, reading (just) hiragana is painful!

That's quite interesting about Italian! Those are some useful sounding resources for Japanese, I'll have to look into them! Yomitan sounds like a good way to save me from running to google translate and wiktionary (I really enjoy breaking down some of the words I learn to learn as much as I can about the roots, phonetic changes, etc.) as often!