I would like to add a description (details), but it would be a very long text.
In short: I have depression, multiple chronic illnesses, C-PTSD, ADHD (btw, I could treat it with Adderall/Adderall XL, but there all drugs are banned, even for medical purposes), no money to rent on my own, poor physical and mental health, some basic things I don’t have money for, I don’t have a computer and it seems that my laptop will soon broken…
I can’t go to a psychologist because… the quality of education and medicine in this country is terrible, and it’s dangerous to say “everything” here, my mother recently worked, but now she’s left without work and starts doing some kind of crap, she was the one who brought in the income until this time; she feeds me fast food. In this country everyone doesn’t give a sh*t about each other, I am surrounded by “broken” people, this is a country full of cynics, sociopaths, and narcissists (consider mentally ill… and genetically defective, apparently).
Like this… I am spoiled, my life and my future are spoiled.
English is notoriously one of the hardest languages to learn. Don’t worry about getting the tenses wrong. People do that all the time who are conversationally fluent speaking English as a second language. Any native English speaker won’t be phased by it, and can easily tell what you’re saying.
If someone said they maked a mistake, I wouldn’t be confused. If someone said “I was going to the mall yesterday” any native English speaker would know that you meant “I went to the mall yesterday.”
Consider that your mental health situation might be giving you some tunnel vision making it easy to rule out viable paths forward. Honestly, if you can read and understand this response, I would say you are generally fluent. At least with reading and writing.
When mental health is flaring negatively, we have a severe negative attention bias. When things are bad enough, someone could give you the actual perfect solution, and a depressed brain will latch on to the small details that make it sound not so good, and rule it out to be not viable. This is just something that anyone struggling with mental health needs to become aware of.
Since I was a kid, I was always told that English is one of the easiest languages to learn. I learned it primarily from movies, shows and videogames. School wasn’t very helpful in that regard. My usage of the language is almost exclusively for listening and reading, I speak in it very sparsely. Nobody in my vicinity uses it. So I wouldn’t consider myself to be fluent because I have no idea how my conversation with native speaker would go. If I catch myself, I try to think in it every chance I get.
I agree that English is the easiest language, there are fewer rules than in Russian. And the difficult ones, it seems to me, are Arabic and Chinese
English can be difficult for western Europeans because it is the mutant child of both Germanic and Latin based languages that picks and chooses which words and rules to use at random.
Every (almost) language uses words and rules at random compared to what you grew up in. It’s jist how human brain works IMO.
I’ve messed with Spanish, Italian, German, and Swahili. It is not my opinion that these languages are more difficult to learn than English, even with the reduced pronouns and gendered nouns.
I think you’re doing great.
I believe “I was going to the mall yesterday” is perfectly grammatical. It’s in the past continuous tense, if I’m not mistaken, and it would generally be used to describe something we were doing when something else happened.
Replace “going” with “walking”, and you have the first sentence in someone’s story about, say, the dinosaur attack they witnessed on the way to the mall.