Japanese language school - 日本語学校の辛い経験

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• published: 23 Jul 2014
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(字幕あり) What is it like going to a Japanese language school to learn Japanese. Is it good? Is it bad? For me it just wasn't something that fit. You have to ask yourself why you want to learn Japanese. I want to learn full Japanese because I live in Japan. I don't want to take any tests, I am not interested in the JLPT. So I wasn't meant for a Japanese language school. COST: They range, starting at about $4000 for 6 months. You get a student visa for 6 months at a time, it can be renewed up to 2 years at a language school. After that you have to go on to university if you still want to stay on a student visa. If you don't attend school or are late, your visa will be removed. In order to attend a language school, you must prove you have enough money to support yourself. It means your parents have to show they have between 10,000-20,000$ just sitting in the bank ready to take care of you. THE PROBLEMS I HAD Mistakes in the books. My ex boyfriend and friends noticed many mistakes, as well as I noticed many mistakes in the text books. They also focused on teaching us unnatural sentences and situations we would never come accross in real life. Students would make example sentences that were ok grammar wise, but strange in a normal Japanese situation and only half the teachers would correct them. Kanji learning flaws. Since it was geared towards passing the JLPT, there was no order or structure or in depth focus on learning proper kanji. We were given 6 random kanji a day, told to write it 4 times. Had to remember how to read 20 words and that was it. We didn't learn how to properly use these vocabulary in real life and most people didn't even remember the words we learned. Just remembering patterns so we were able to take and pass the test. We would learn grammar patterns but not really understand how to use them in real life, but really remembering the sounds and patterns and rules. If we see this letter, it must mean that this pattern comes next. Remembering this will make you remember it to pass the test, even if you don't understand the information on the test. All reading word we did was very slow. The teacher spoke slow even in the higher levels. The listening tapes were also very slow and robotic voices. The situations on the questions we had to answer also were very flawed. There was often times where there is more than one answer that is correct on the test, or no answer is correct. The answers that we were expected to given in class were very unnatural. We never ommited the subject of a sentence which is almost always done in Japanese unless needed to specify. This is ok to do in English, but in Japanese it often changes the meaning of the sentence. In Japanese adding information can make it sound so unnatural and strange or change the meaning all together. One thing that pissed my friends off the most is they taught us yaru, which long ago, used to mean the same as ageru. They taught us that children, pets or people lower than you, you should use yaru instead of ageru. This is rude and dirty language in todays Japanese. It would only be acceptable to say such a thing perhapse when you are talking about a plant. If you said this for someones pet, they might feel so disturbed that you used such word. And for sure if you used this for someones kid. It is almost like talking down to someone and it is not used at all. Just imagine calling a women in todays America, not a person, it would be unacceptable. The teachers went on to teach us this without saying anything, till I raised my voice and told them it is wrong. There are also a lot of unused grammar points they teach us that are too old for people to know, or grammar points only used in old movies or poems, but the teachers often don't make it VERY aware that its not used. There are vocabulary that was on my list of words to know, that not my young friends, their parents or my 60 year old friends even knew. Slang is ofcourse not taught, but not only this but words used in todays society was taught that it is WRONG. Even though it is not. Such as ranukikotoba. korareru vs koreru. Both you should know, and both are ok to use, even in buisness situations says multiple sourses. I also found it funny that even the teachers off duty themselves used these words. These are not new slang, but have been around even in the 70s. They are written on signs and are used everywhere, even on the news. The school also teaches us using casual Japanese is too rude and that you should aways use watashi. http://www.facebook.com/kanadajin3 http://www.twitter.com/kanadajin3 http://kanadajin3.blogspot.jp/ http://instagram.com/kanadajin3