7 years full of nothing 7 years ago I registered here. That was 2010, my first year in the university. I did my first steps in Japanese and was hoping that this site will help me to improve my skills in easy and joyful way. And it could help me, I think, if I'd fulfilled the one and only requirement. If I'd used it regularly, writing new notes, looking for new language partners and working together on improving my language skills. Well, now it is the first or the second time I visited italki since 2010. Let's conduct kind of review of my achievements during those 7 years. I still can write in English. I can't say, if it can be called an "achievement". I am not sure, If I have become any closer to a title of a fluent speaker (or at least writer). Every sentence in this texts takes a tangible portion of energy as I'm not sure about grammar or proper using of words. Well, at least I can write something. But just a thought about speaking in English makes me tremble inside. And the first reaction to it is "Why should I even speak to someone? I have enough silly conversations in my mother language...". Yep, attacking is the best defense - my inner defeated voice wants me to belive it. Ok, my English is good enough to write some nonsense here, what about Japanese, which was my major in the university and which I sepnt 4 years on? Let's start from the good news. I definitely can write and speak in Japanese better than 7 years ago. But I still suck. My level of proficiency stucked about 4-5 years ago. I should admit that 5 years ago I thought that I become a fluent speaker by this moment and be doing some cool work somewhere in Japan, connecting different people and civilizations. Reality was much harsher. I was almost kicked out of the university, because I just didn't write my graduation paper (I did it two nights before exam - 90 pages of pseudo-scintific gibberish without any useful information; I still feel that shame). I've spent almost 2 years unemployed, because "there was no job good enough for me / I was not good enough for a good job". And I've finally found some job to pay bills - not that kind of achievement I could dream about. Okay, I should stop here. There's no any real purpose to write this text. I'm still on my way and there's no happy end. Luckily, I still think I have some potential. I will be glad if you check this text and correct my mistakes. I'm sorry if you feel that you wasted your time reading this. Greatness awaits lol