I am an English teacher, and students will actually say to me, “I hate English!” It’s my native language but I am not offended. Most of them have to study it for their careers and as some kind of magic key to success or hurdle to jump. It is a confusing and contradictory mess of irregularity. I tell them, find something to like about it, do what you enjoy but do it in English, have fun with it. If they make the language they study a part of their lives, they tend to do much better in class. I have had students who were indifferent to English, somewhat hostile even, but were found to be studying French or Korean (!!) on their own because they liked French films or K-pop.

Good luck with Arabic, Turkish and Persian — I am working on those also. I live in Turkey so I speak fairly adequate Turkish for most situations — it could be better, I think, but I am always pushing and challenging myself. I wanted to learn Persian, but in Turkey there are not a lot of Persian speakers. I had the chance to learn Kurdish (Kurmanji), which is related, so I figured if I ever studied Persian I would have a jump on it. That is a fascinating sidetrack; Kurmanji is arguably one of the least immediately “useful” languages I have ever studied, but one of the most personally rewarding. (I am finding now that it’s not nearly as close to Persian as I was told, but a lot of words and expressions are the same)

You mentioned forming connections — this is one of the keys to becoming a mad polyglot IME. It’s really obvious with Romance and Slavic languages, but just the overarching Indo-European connection can be reassuring to an English speaker in languages one might think had nothing in common — Persian, for example. The more associations with what you already know that you can find in the target language, the more connections you can make among them, the easier it gets. With Turkish the biggest bridge to English is a pretty large number of borrowed French words. Arabic is a major vocabulary builder in many Middle Eastern languages; also once you get used to reading and writing right to left Persian is far less intimidating. The Middle Eastern languages, I find, have a lot of common vocabulary despite not being linguistically related in many cases.

It would be interesting to have some insight into how one goes from restaurant and grocery store proficiency to reading news stories and academic papers, as there is often a huge difference between spoken and written languages.