Here's a tip for learning to speak Japanese well:
Japanese is not a tonal language like Chinese or Thai. It does, however, have a pitch accent on certain words (which is less pronounced in northern Japanese). This means words that look the same when written in romaji may have two or more different meanings depending on where you place the pitch accent. The Japanese have a remarkable capacity for NOT understanding you, even when the context is clear, if you do not pronounce these words exactly the way they do. A classic example is "hashi" which can mean "bridge(s)", "chopstick(s)" or "blade(s)". If you make a sentence such as "Can you eat with chopsticks too?" but you use the pitch accent for "bridge", it will take a second or two for the meaning to click in, even in an obvious context such as that! Sometimes it will take a while for the penny to drop but it will often not drop at all! I have stood in front of a class with a picture of a Japanese castle in my hand, pointed to it, and said "How do you say "shiro" in English?" and the students have looked blank, until one of them ventures an answer, "White"!!! You guessed it - pitch accent dictates meaning!
Your textbooks will probably not say anything about pitch accent, let alone indicate where these pitfalls are, nor will most dictionaries. The one dictionary that I have that does is very basic and does not contain many of the words I want to look up.
Good luck!
