Sometimes getting to the point where you can understand a new language seems impossible, like you're just walking into a wall. I randomly decided to look up idioms and found this
http://www.englishdaily626.com/idioms.php
To me it's kind of funny, because I can understand most of those, but to someone learning English, idioms must seem completely crazy. o_O To see those and realize how many I understand, and how easily I understand them, is really encouraging. If you think about your own language, you'll find proof that you CAN speak a language well and understand it and all of its intricacies. I try to think about this whenever I'm feeling discouraged about Japanese. Hopefully this will be encouraging to someone else too.

Very interesting link! I'm going to study english again someday, and that link will certainly be useful!

I personally love american english and some of those expressions I already know, but most of them are unknown to me.

English is not my native language and these idioms really seem crazy. It's really surprising because I feel pretty confident in English (at least at understanding) but I see that there are still many things that I don't know. Native speaker has enormous knowledge in his language, he can construct grammatical sentences without thinking about it and tends to know even the most obscure things about the language, which seems pretty discouraging to the learner, but I believe that by really immersing in the language we can acquire any level that we truly want, so that we can enjoy and do things that we want using that language. And when we encounter something that we don't know we can still learn, there isn't any limit to our learning ability.

That links makes me love being native English Chinese. I would imagine the different for a Japanese person learning English. Japanese is a piece of cake compared to English(in terms of vocabulary and grammar). The main problem is probably kanji, and being Chinese helps. Love the best of both worlds.