I live in Japan. I have been here for 4 months. I came knowing zero japanese as it was never my plan to live here.

I picked up some "survival japanese" from reading websites and looking up the phrases I heard most often. Signed up for japanese classes and at first I felt ahead of the class as I was at izakaya every night listening and trying to learn.

However now the class has gotten more difficult. We have learned verbs and are expected to make acutall sentences. Learning to count was just memorization, but sentences, I can't do. I remember struggling at this point when learning langauges back in highschool as well. I could never think in a language, just peice words together.

Any tips for how to actually transition from just knowing a bunch of nouns (and combining them to gestures) to actually forming proper sentences? It seems that the verbs are harder for me to remember since they don't always sound the same way and don't have a concrete object to associate them with.

Just looking for tips if anyone else struggled with this.