Is there any word or phrase that describe messed up letters? For example, something like these letters "文字化け" which was a Japanese word but it got messed up due to encoding trouble. This often happens when transferring files between Windows and Mac, etc. By the way, it's called "mojibake" in Japanese so I searched it on Wikipedia and it says it's same in English but I don't know how many people use mojibake in English.

How do you keep yourself motivated for learning another language? I feel my English has gotten so much better. However, even though I can feel my English has been improved, sometimes I can't keep myself motivated for it. I mean, I just feel down and wish I could speak English like a native speaker. Say, I feel down when I find that I don't have many vocabularies. I do understand that it takes time and I have to devote myself to learn it. I'm sure many people here experience the same thing. What do you guys do whenever you lose confidence in your learning? For me, I usually watch Japanese TV shows, read manga, play Japanese games or eat something yummy(this works pretty well for me lol). I come back to my native language for a moment and after that I feel refreshed and I'm like "Okay, now it's time to get to work!" Though I sometimes feel down, I never thought I'm going to give up learning English because that defeats the purpose (I'm in the US to study English) and I find it very interesting. Thanks to be able to write/speak in English somewhat, I've got many friends from all over the world that I wouldn't be able to meet if I didn't have enough English skills. So... I guess my friends make me motivated, too? Well, it's great have nice friends for sure. Thank you for reading and have a good day.

The only way to improve my speaking skill In Japan, we start learning English from 7th grade and we usually study writing and reading plus a bit of listening NO speaking. Now I'm 23. So I've studied English for more than 10 years! (Actually I'm surprised at this number) Though I have studied it for a long time, I think my speaking skill isn't good enough. When I was 21, I decided to go to the US to learn English more efficiently. As a result, I've been in the US for more than 2 years. Even though I'd studied English almost 10 years, I literally couldn't speak English at all. I could say something super simple like "I'm from Japan. Nice to meet you. How are you? I'm fine. " To be honest, I was very shocked that I couldn't do well with my spoken English. I had struggled a lot. I still have trouble with speaking English sometime but it has gotten so much better. I've been here only 2 years but at least I can communicate with native speakers. Of course I have hard time with understanding what they mean or hearing what they just said. The reason why my speaking skill gets better is sinply I have to talk in English. I have to use it as a tool to communicate with people here. Since I'm a very shy person, it took long time to get used to it. The more I'm used to talk in English, the more I can speak English. Language is a tool for me and you have to figure out how to use it. That's the answer that I came up with. It's very simple but my personality(being very shy) interrupted my progress. It was very challenging for me to not be afraid of making mistakes and to talk to people in English. Though I said my English is much better than before, I still want to improve it as much as possible and that's why I'm here, italki. There're so many chances to be friends with English speakers here. I thought "if there's a chance that you can grab it, then why not?" Well, I don't know how to wrap up my notebook entry... I just wated to say, all you have to is speak, speak, speak, and speak! to be able to conversationally fluent in another language. Thank you for reading and have a good day.