Hi everyone,

I'll be going to university this fall and would like to take advantage of the Japanese material I've already learned so that I may place somewhere into 2nd year Japanese. I plan to continue with Japanese through university so that I can get into literary analysis and study-abroad opportunities.

Reading wise, I'm about N3 and don't expect to have difficulty with the written placement exam. However, with regards to production, becuase my primary application for language learning thus far has been consuming Anime and literature rather than conversing, I'm significantly less comfortable in oral (and perhaps written) production.

The oral examination consists of me sitting in a lecture-hall listening to a tape recorder and orally recording my answers. The university uses Genki for the 1st year course series, and I'd assume that, with respect to content validity, all the material I'd need to know to test into 2nd year would be in the Genki text.

I don't have any native speakers available to me, though, given the potential tuition savings, would be willing to use commercial resources. I don't have any language learning/ conversation partners either, though as I write this I begin to wonder if there are other pre-freshman in my area in similar situations that might make good conversation partners.

It may be suggested that, given my poor oral production capacity, I just start with the 1st year course series, but I'd rather not disregard the hundreds of hours I've already put into the language.

Does anyone have any advice? I was thinking of just doing through the Genki oral exercises (this is probably the simple answer) by myself, but ultimately I think reading from a text and then speaking back, lacking the theatricality of speaking with a conversation partner, may not provide the best "real" skill with oral production, which I think is the ideal rather than just learning to the test. I have the Tobira text and remember that it comes with some kind of audio-visual language lab, so I plan to look into that and determine whether speaking to a video of a person is theatrical enough for me to assimilate the skillset, but I'm not aware of any language lab type environmental for Genki level materials. I have a whole summer to prepare, so time isn't too much of an issue.

Tbh, I don't have experience learning oral production for any learned language (4 years of HS Latin, woo!), so I'm not too familiar with oral learning. Any particular methods/ techniques would be appreciated.

Thanks! Sorry for the length of the post, thank you for making it this far!

So basically, the tape asks you questions, and you say your answers to...the teacher? Another tape recorder?


There are skype chatrooms if you really want someone to talk to, it's not something I'm familiar with but I've seen others here talk about it. There is also Lang-8 if you want to practice your composition skills

If your school uses Genki then you can probably concentrate on that and do fine, it's fairly straightforward as far as language textbooks go. If the school is anything like mine they will actually use Tobira after they finish Genki. Genki also comes with an audio cd, so you can practice listening from the cd. Your main issue with jumping into 2nd year is that your classmates might be better speakers than you, although in my experience, after doing first year Genki a lot of students still arent that comfortable at speaking still.

If you have the money you could also potentially hire a tutor to talk with you and bump up those skills, but personally I wouldn't do that unless you really want to spend the money.

Thinking back to my oral exams from that textbook's year (these exams were short "interview" type things with the teacher) I remember one of the exams had to do with ordering food in Japanese, another had to do with talking about your holiday plans, not really so much to stress over.

Just go to italki.com and pick a tutor for speaking. I don't have any Japanese people around too, and that's a great tool to make up for it. Lessons are really cheap too.