I recall zooming through unit2 no problem when I used that book. Although by that time I had already been apartment hunting in Japan.

I actually thought that 中級から上級への日本語 was a pretty good text.

Ditto.
I would recommend it.

snispilbor Wrote:Not only is the text romaji, it's some bucked up moon-romaji which is absolutely retarded. Though, it does include Toukyou-ben tones. Example dialog to show the romaji:

"Kore mo sore mo, onazi zassi desu ka?
Ie, tigaimasu yo."

(In case your brain breaks trying to read that horrific romaji system, it is
これもそれも、同じ雑誌ですか？
いえ、違いますよ。)

I'm guessing it's that book by Eleanor Harz Jordan, right? I bought the Baron's audio CD set and it came with that book. (I actually bought 2 more of them before I realized how bad the romaji was.) I've never gotten around doing the CD course because I hated the book so much.

I really feel for you, being stuck with it in class. At least I only wasted like $140.

Those romaji systems are outdated at all, they just have different focuses. The point of the Hepburn romaji system is to give you a decent ability to read how a word is pronounced. It's currently the most popular and common system in the West. Problem with it: It doesn't show you exactly how something is written in hiragana (for example, oo and ou is written the same way, ganbaru is also written gambaru in proper Hepburn). It also doesn't show as clearly how logical Japanese verb conjugations are (matsu, machimasu, where the hell did the ch come from?).

Nihon-shiki however is the most popular system in Japan. It simply has romaji for every kana, based on logic. Thus, it's matu, matimasu, so to show how the tu becomes a ti, not a tsu which becomes a chi.

I personally prefer Hepburn because I'm used to it, but one should understand the pros and cons of both. If you for some reason write in romaji with a Japanese person, they will usually use Nihon-shiki.

Well, the Nihon-shiki is closer to portuguese. The Hepburn is closer to english. So in US there would be some reason not to use nihon-shiki.

What I think it is the strangest is that Hepburn is used here in brazil too, where nihon-shiki fits much better.

So, when I have to use romanji, you'll see nihon-siki.

I have only studied Japanese at one university, which used "Japanese: The Spoken Language" by Eleanor Harz Jorden and Mari Noda. On the good side, after the first night, the class was non-English and if one wanted to ask questions of the professor, you had to stay after class or in office hours. Knowledge of the topics was expected by reading the text outside of class and by listening to the CDs.

On the bad side, the entire 1st semester was in that horrible romajii that this book series uses. The 2nd semester we learned the kana and then got into the kanji after that, using the "Japanese: The Written Language" series. But the main texts were still written in English and romajii.

Another bad thing about the classroom experience was.... my classmates. The professor set out the expectation the first night of class that it would take 1 hour of study time per day to keep up with the pace of the course. The course did move briskly - we got through a large part of the JSL book 1 in the first semester. But most students in the class didn't do this, not even close, so the class just ended up being so much rehash of topics covered in the previous weeks. I think I was the only "serious" student in the class, and it was painful sometimes.

The University of Colorado @ Boulder where I live now does have (as I understand it) a pretty solid Japanese program. Sometimes I am tempted by it, but I think I am progressing better using the AJATT method. I know it is certainly more entertaining than the classroom method was, which compels me to stick with it more.

I still have not tried the classroom with japanese.

I've tried it for English, with total failure. I did French too. The French class was with a private tutor and it was progressing very well, but self study simply is more flexible, you can do more hours and it can be fun.

The thing of the classroom is that I long for companions. I'd like to have some pals doing Japanese too just to be part of a group. I'll try to attend a 1h/weak class or something like this next year.
My friends who frequent classes are way behind me in Japanese, but they have their pals to go out and eat Japanese food.

How quickly do they progress through the writing at most universities?
The one I went to was like this:

semester 1: hiragana
semester 2: katakana
semester 3: 50 kanji
semester 4: 50 kanji

After 2 years of Japanese at the university you could almost pass JLPT ４級.
Is that normal?

PrettyKitty Wrote:How quickly do they progress through the writing at most universities?
The one I went to was like this:

semester 1: hiragana
semester 2: katakana
semester 3: 50 kanji
semester 4: 50 kanji

After 2 years of Japanese at the university you could almost pass JLPT ４級.
Is that normal?

That sounds terribly slow to me. If it's going that slow then I don't even see the point in going to a University for study. You can study by yourself and get a much higher level than that after 2 years.

PrettyKitty Wrote:How quickly do they progress through the writing at most universities?
The one I went to was like this:

semester 1: hiragana
semester 2: katakana
semester 3: 50 kanji
semester 4: 50 kanji

After 2 years of Japanese at the university you could almost pass JLPT ４級.
Is that normal?

No, I think hiragana, katakana, and 20-50 kanji in the first semester is normal.

PrettyKitty Wrote:How quickly do they progress through the writing at most universities?
The one I went to was like this:

semester 1: hiragana
semester 2: katakana
semester 3: 50 kanji
semester 4: 50 kanji

After 2 years of Japanese at the university you could almost pass JLPT ４級.
Is that normal?

I'm the first one to claim Universities are way too slow, but that's not possible. I know that in Sweden, they start with kanji in the first semester, and I'm pretty sure they're at 4級 level after the first year, maybe even higher than that.

In the language school I went to in Japan, we learned hiragana and katakana in the first week, more or less, then we started learning 6 new kanji every day (with readings and compounds included).

Tobberoth Wrote:In the language school I went to in Japan, we learned hiragana and katakana in the first week, more or less, then we started learning 6 new kanji every day (with readings and compounds included).

If you met more often or for longer than most university classes, it wouldn't be surprising if you went faster. Also if they just had higher standards. Most people on this forum probably have a lot more time to dedicate to language study than the average college student.

Edit: Also, in terms of writing, in reality it may not necessarily be an issue of speed so much as ordering. For example, my college waited half a semester to introduce katakana so that we wouldn't confuse it with hiragana, so that they could spend more time on other areas early on, and also so that we would already know enough loan words to make katakana useful.

What amazed me was... a lot of people couldn't keep up at that pace even. It's not like we were learning a lot of grammar/vocab either. Everything was really slow. I took the full 2 years so I could remain full time status without having a heavy work load of classes. I already knew hiragana, katakana, and about 500~ kanji before I started, so I thought it would be easy. I think it would have been easy regardless.

They used that Jordan book too. I remember other students spending a lot of time memorizing the accent marks. "ar?m?su" (Edit: I can't seem to write it, 'i' with accent going the usual Spanish direction, 'a' with accent going the opposite way (`))

And there was lots of important info like, "You do not need to learn 'koto ga dekimasu' because it is so rarely used."

Toberoth, you should take on consideration that you are talkind about Sweden. Its education statistics are above the chart, comparing to other countries.

Yeah, OSU is using JSL by Eleanor Hanz Jordan. I love how the "list of countries" in one of the lessons includes "sobieto" (U.S.S.R.) Makes me feel old school and retro

Yeah, classmates are a good reason to go to class. When I took Mandarin 101, it was just me and 3 other guys in a class which was otherwise made up of girls, most of them quite doable

And, the independent study option is almost free credits. Very useful for meeting units-per-quarter requirements as a pre-candidacy PhD student.

What do you think of this:
1 class weekly (2 hours)

semester 1 : minna no nihongo chapter 1-5
semester 2 : minna no nihongo chapter 6-10
semester 3 : minna no nihongo chapter 11-15
semester 4 : minna no nihongo chapter 16-20
semester 5 : minna no nihongo chapter 21-25
semester 6 : minna no nihongo chapter 26-30
semester 7 : minna no nihongo chapter 31-35
semester 8 : minna no nihongo chapter 36-40
semester 9 : minna no nihongo chapter 41-45
semester 10: minna no nihongo chapter 46-50
semester 11: wakatte tsukaeru chapter 1-8

usis35 Wrote:What do you think of this:
1 class weekly (2 hours)

semester 1 : minna no nihongo chapter 1-5
semester 2 : minna no nihongo chapter 6-10
semester 3 : minna no nihongo chapter 11-15
semester 4 : minna no nihongo chapter 16-20
semester 5 : minna no nihongo chapter 21-25
semester 6 : minna no nihongo chapter 26-30
semester 7 : minna no nihongo chapter 31-35
semester 8 : minna no nihongo chapter 36-40
semester 9 : minna no nihongo chapter 41-45
semester 10: minna no nihongo chapter 46-50
semester 11: wakatte tsukaeru chapter 1-8

It will take you 18 years to reach fluency. You should be doing an entire book or at least half of it per semester.

mystes Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:In the language school I went to in Japan, we learned hiragana and katakana in the first week, more or less, then we started learning 6 new kanji every day (with readings and compounds included).

If you met more often or for longer than most university classes, it wouldn't be surprising if you went faster. Also if they just had higher standards. Most people on this forum probably have a lot more time to dedicate to language study than the average college student.

Of course, one can't expect the same speed in a university setting where you study 2 hours ever other day, where as I studied 4 hours every day in Japan, I just added it to give perspective on how much it can vary from class to class, not even all colleges have the same amount of time alloted so it can vary within normal universities as well.

What I really wanted to state was simply that if it takes more than a year to reach JLPT4 level the speed just isn't sufficient, considering how lite JLPT4 is.

With the speed on my japanese language school, we were supposed to be above JLPT3 after 6 months. That is obviously a LOT faster than is to be expected from a college, but even in a college where you study just a few hours a week in school, you're supposed to do homework as well, something we rarely had in Japan (outside of actually living in Japan that is). At least from my perspective, a person who is majoring in Japanese at a college SHOULD spend so much time on his studies of Japanese that he can easily reach JLPT4 in 6 months.

Like mentat_kgs pointed out though, it depends a lot on country and even what specific university within a country, so one can't be too general about it.

Wow... I thought my school went slow. We did Hiragana and Katakana in the first week. The second week started kanji. But we only did half of genki per semester. That was really slow.

PrettyKitty Wrote:How quickly do they progress through the writing at most universities?
The one I went to was like this:

semester 1: hiragana
semester 2: katakana
semester 3: 50 kanji
semester 4: 50 kanji

After 2 years of Japanese at the university you could almost pass JLPT ４級.
Is that normal?

I would say that is slower than usual.

Hearing about how quickly various universities introduce japanese is interesting. I just checked out the website for another university I studied at (university of auckland) in New Zealand. I would guess the academic level at this university is on par with a decent state college in the USA or a decent Australian university. Not really sure about how it compares with universities in european countries for instance.

Anyway Auckland university covers genki I in the first year, genki II in the second year. And then the third year uses the text "New Approach Japanese Intermediate Course", which I haven't seen but I think is about JLPT2 level.

So it looks like over three years they try and get you to about JLPT2 level. On the website they stated that in the first year, you need to learn 150 kanji.

To be fair on a lot of these universities and based on other peoples comments, how many people do you think would stick with a japanese language major if they made the course really tough introducing large numbers of kanji each semester? Sure the people on these site might stick with the course given their passion for japanese, but others wouldn't and you would soon see enrolments drop sharply and the lecturers would find themselves without jobs. I think a lot of universities these days are fighting two opposing forces, on one hand they are arrogant and want to be elitist and only have the best students, on the other hand they want to keep their relatively well paid and secure jobs, so don't want to weed out too many customers !

One other thing is that most universities seem to have a placement test, so if you already know some japanese there is no need to start at the beginning, you can skip straight to an appropriate level.

PrettyKitty Wrote:How quickly do they progress through the writing at most universities?
The one I went to was like this:

semester 1: hiragana
semester 2: katakana
semester 3: 50 kanji
semester 4: 50 kanji

We learnt all the hiragana and katakana in the first two weeks...

MeNoSavvy Wrote:To be fair on a lot of these universities and based on other peoples comments, how many people do you think would stick with a japanese language major if they made the course really tough introducing large numbers of kanji each semester? Sure the people on these site might stick with the course given their passion for japanese, but others wouldn't and you would soon see enrolments drop sharply and the lecturers would find themselves without jobs. I think a lot of universities these days are fighting two opposing forces, on one hand they are arrogant and want to be elitist and only have the best students, on the other hand they want to keep their relatively well paid and secure jobs, so don't want to weed out too many customers !

On the other hand, if they get a rep for not teaching you enough, they're in the same position. I would think it would be better to have a tough reputation than an easy one, but extremes are always bad.

Sadly, I haven't even managed to get the local Uni to respond to my inquiries about JP class. At this point, I think I'm better off just learning on my own and maybe hiring a weekly tutor.

The course I'm taking covers hiragana, katakana and some 30 kanji in one semester. Obviously, the whole thing is way below my current level. I mainly go there so I can ask the teacher about confusing stuff I come across while AJATTing. That, and I occasionally need someone to remind me that not everything should be written in kanji. I don't know for sure how well the actual beginners are doing. It may be a suitable pace if you've never studied Japanese before... and don't want to.

Not to insult Japanese people but unless someone is a teacher (and maybe even then) I wouldn't pay a whole lot of heed to what they say about learning Japanese.

I think 90% of Japanese people I know think that Heisig is a joke and could never work, even when I show them that it does.

If you were Japanese, lived in Japan your whole life, graduated a Japanese high school/college, and someone told you that people of non-Asian language cultures could learn how to write all the kanji from memory in a few months, which is something you as a native still can't do, you probably wouldn't believe it either...

Has anyone had experience with native vs non-native Japanese teachers? Does one seem to go slower than the other?