Last year I started a weekly japanese Course. 12 x 75 min. 7 students.
Now I have to decide If I want to continue or Not. I have never done any language Course outside of school before and am Not able to compare the quality.
I only have my self Study experience to compare it to and feel Like I am wasting my time there. The next Semester (12 x 75 min) will start in 4-5 month. During that time I will continue my self Study and am assuming that I will be a Lot ahead of the Course Material.
The teachers writing is very difficult to read. I can read Hiragana. So thatâs not the problem.
She is not a native Japanese and I donât know If she has a heavy accent or not. And she is also not very good at my native language.
Iâm also unsure If she is generally a good teacher.
Speaking is not my main goal. I want to be able to read books and watch movies/Series. We only do speaking and Reading exercises. The Reading exercises of one of her handwritten Texts is very difficult and I hate it.
I need advice how to decide If I will continue or not.
Has anyone experience with learning Japanese with a teacher in a classroom?
Canât comment on how your classroom experience compares as I have never been in one for Japanese, but reading handwriting can be challenging, even in published works.
I have had experience with it, given that I have taken a few semesters of college Japanese. From what you have written here, I hesitate to recommend taking a course but I am curious as to what your existing study method is and what the class is planning on teaching you. In the classes I have taken, generally all four skills are studied simultaneously: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. You will improve your ability to understand written Japanese handwriting and spoken speech by doing these things yourself, so even though that is your goal I would not say that doing output is a waste of time; in fact, it is quite beneficial towards it. Do you know what textbook the class is teaching on? Genki seems to be the common one, and it works quite well in a classroom, given that is the exact audience it was designed for. When I was in Japan, I became very grateful to have done so many of the situations from that book with my peers since it made me practice many commonplace interactions. Courses do go slower than self study, but you get more out of them in terms of output. I think they can definitely be worth it.
Iâve done about 1h of class a week for 3 years and Iâd say it wasnât very efficient but the question Iâd ask you is will that class be replaced by another or not ? (If that class is replaced by something else that is additional time taken on the time you would have had to study Japanese.)
The problem of class in my experience is that youâre going at the pace of the slowest students which can be daunting if youâre motivated. If youâre self studying youâll probably be more advanced an can be left alone (if class is mandatory) that may be the best compromise to aim for (depending on the context). The objective is before all for you is to have dedicated time to learn Japanese.
Itâs Not a Semester at a school or Uni. I just call it Semester because the teacher used that Word and because itâs two times 12 hours per year. So just 24 out of the 52 weeks that a year has. That is Not very much.
I donât have any concrete plans yet to replace it by another Course that focuses on speaking. I thought about Pimsleur but havenât decided yet, because I havenât finished my self study textbooks yet.
I often speak when I learn Kanji with WaniKani or when I write sentences when I learn with the textbooks.
Considering how little time that represent, Iâd say youâre better of with self-study provided that youâll stay rigorous and do the work in all four skill of the language (as @Shikaschlep said) regularly.
JapanesePod 101 for listening. My Goal is to get used to Hearing Japanese.
WaniKani + Writing Kanji
Textbooks for Grammar. I use Japanese from Zero to learn New Grammar and other books for repetition.
I learn vocabulary when I use them in the textbooks. At the Moment I only use Anki to Support my learning with the textbooks. For example: Verbs and their conjugation because I need that to be able to do the exercises in the textbook.
If you did not already
iâd suggest to try
the free bunpro
(even at one grammar lesson a day youâll build a lot of knowledge and itâs 0 effort to dive in like Wani, you come you review youâre done)
and https://jpdb.io/ for 0 effort vocab deck with sound and example sentences a lot less time consuming to setup than anki, but better suited for exposure than mining
We are currently at Chapter 6/30 of Japanisch im Sauseschritt. Some of the others already had taken previous Semesters. So when I started we repeated Chapter 1-3/4 in maybe 3 lessons and then continued in a slower pace with the book.
I tried Bunpro a few weeks ago for grammar but I prefer my textbooks. Maybe I will try it in the Future again for repetition.
I already bought some books (with and without Furigana) and Hope to be able to integrate Reading of Books in my Study plan soon. The ones with Furigana havenât arrived yet. And the ones without Furigana are too difficult at the Moment. There are some premade decks at jpdb for these books.
I decided against graded Readers because they are too expensive.
Whether the teacher and course are amazing or terrible wonât really matter. 15h of cumulated Japanese study by itself, no matter how good, will be a drop in the ocean of practice you need to become proficient at Japanese.
That doesnât mean that itâs a bad idea to take the class, but regardless of how you choose to proceed youâll probably want to do a lot more on your own time. If you think the class can have a purpose within your study plan, then go for it.
If youâre mainly interested in being able to read first and foremost thatâs kind of the wrong way to go IMO. You want to focus on recognition and dive hard into kanji IMO.
Thatâs what I did and I can barely string together a sentence in Japanese but I can read intermediate stuff.
The fact it is romaji-only is reason enough to not take the course. You want a course that will teach you to read hiragana, katakana, and kanjiâwithout reading Japanese in its own writing system, you will implicitly use the pronunciation rules of your own language when reading it, which will make your speech incorrect. Most early textbooks cover the same content, so there should not be a problem in reading, say, the first few chapters of Genki and skipping around until you find a chapter that suits your abilities. It would likely be for the best for you to continue with your self-study and use a service like HiNativeâor skipping the middleman and speaking to native speakers in real lifeâfor improving your output. There is one advantage to taking a course that you cannot do by yourself which is feedback from natives on your speaking and writing. I highly recommend you do this, as it was the main benefit of taking a course in my experience!
It sounds to me like youâve already decided that you donât want to take this course, and are looking for this forum to validate your decision.
Do what you want to do. No decision is the end of the world and it is impossible to compare the difference in outcomes between taking the course and not taking the course, so there isnât even a way to evaluate which would be better.
If you take the course and regret it, donât take the next one. If you donât take the course and regret it, sign up for a different course later.
Your command of English seems sufficient to use an English to Japanese textbook if youâd prefer that to your current textbook.
To answer your direct question, I have experience with Japanese in a classroom setting. All of the learning happened outside of the classroom. I did reading and writing tests in the classroom, which provided accountability, but actually learning kanji was done elsewhere. The teacher was there to provide gentle corrections and explain anything I didnât understand from the textbook.
Thanks for your opinions. Talking with someone really helped me making a decision.
I will Not continue the Course. 30 hours per year (+driving time) of this Course are Not worth the Money and my time.
Maybe in a few years I will be able to Take the other âCourseâ of three saturdays with 240 min each day. It requires intermediate Niveau (I think). Should I then be more interested in speaking I will try that. The description Sounds Like it is concentrating on speaking too.
When I was in college, I decided to enroll in a Japanese 102 class. I had been self learning and I knew the kanas and some kanji.
First day the professor realized she didnât recognize me from her 101 class and she told me it might be too hard when I told her I was self studying.
But then when we handed in our first written assignment and she saw kanji she pulled me aside to let me know actually it might be too easy and Iâd be bored. The class used a romaji (and kana) textbook and did not do any kanji at all. They spent all of 101 learning hiragana and 102 was for katakana.
I told her that was fine because I wanted to practice speaking and grammar.
I should have listened to her.
I was indeed bored and I did not find it useful to be learning among other people who were not supplementing their learning. If anything, it made my own grammar and pronunciation worse as I was repeatedly exposed to uncorrected mistakes.
The professor thankfully realized there was 1 other person like me and always paired us together for pair assignments (in part because she was the only one who could read my kanji and vice versa), but anytime we did something in bigger groups, or listened to people going around the room, I felt out of place.
So I think youâre right to drop that class, I wish I had. You can always find other means to practice something at your level thanks to the internet.
when i read you use a german book in the course i guess youâre german and might go to a VHS course.
most of those do placement tests to put you in the best course for you. i straight went to a intermediate course (well it was the highest the VHS in my region had) with providing my N2 Test result.
and after there was no further course i checked on other VHS which had online courses, though to be honest even that course now is sometimes really slow.
the problem i see is, that you donât have to do any tests or anything to advance in those courses, so if there is someone who has been in the course from the beginning but didnât study it slows everything down.
on the plus side (at least with most courses i went to) you have someone native (or someone with a degree in japanese) to correct you. in self study you wonât really realize if you studied something the wrong way or if youâre using some word in a totally wrong context⊠or you could, depending on the teacher just ask stuff that came up in your self studyâŠ