Actually, i used to hate english. BUT, calm down!! Before blaming me, i'll explain it to you.The thing is: I didn't know the importance of knowing that language and i always went bad at school, getting some horrible grades. Learning japanese was my single goal. I tried to learn by myself but it was very difficult, i had only books in hands. No internet. Some vocabulary i learnt from my parents (body parts, greetings,counting one to ten...). My writting was all wrong because it didn't teach how to write correctly katakana and hiragana so i just tried to imagine how the sequence would be. However,about the speaking i didn't improve anything, couldn't form phases because the books i had were dictionaries and kanji dictionary. The only person that were fluent in japanese were my gramma and grandpa but they only talked in japanese with fluent people (oh well). Starting from that difficult, i realised some years ago that knowing the universal language will help me a lot, not only to learn japanese but other languages and so on . (*u* )