CaLeDee Wrote:Regarding the integrated approach book that was talked about earlier. Does anyone know if there is any online workbook/question quizzes to test yourself on the stuff in this book? ...

Yep. Renshuu.org has the vocab and some example sentences. Just click on the link for "IJ" that has the book cover (not sure if it's all-inclusive of the revised edition too)

Unfortunately they're not really "comprehension questions"; it's more like a vocab drill. There are a few grammar examples though.

..ignore all this if I'm talking about the wrong book.

atylmo Wrote:Yep. Renshuu.org has the vocab and some example sentences. Just click on the link for "IJ" that has the book cover (not sure if it's all-inclusive of the revised edition too)

Unfortunately they're not really "comprehension questions"; it's more like a vocab drill. There are a few grammar examples though.

..ignore all this if I'm talking about the wrong book.

Yea that's the book. Thanks for posting the website. Wish it had more stuff though! The example sentences should be useful =)

snispilbor Wrote:My big complaint about OSU japanese is the writing. Everything in the first year's textbook is romaji. In 101-102, the only Japanese reading/writing is katakana. 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。)

Romanji textbook...That is painful indeed! Though it's pretty cool your school does the sentence thing though.

Here at my school, it's very slow. Basically [Genki I and II] stretched out over SIX semesters.

Horror Story:
Last semester in the "Advanced" class, on the first day these two foreign exchange students from Japan came in, and the teacher wanted the class to ask questions to them (to see the fruits of their summer study). This one guy asks, "アメリカがスーキ(好き）デスー（です）か。”　Just like that. "America ga SOOKEE deSOO ka."

You should have seen the look on the exchange students faces as they looked at the professor for a translation lol. I felt kind of embarrassed of being in the class after that, not because of the guy (who was trying his best, nothing wrong with that), but because this was considered "Advanced" at this school. I was thinking there'd be nearly fluent students and tons of homework. How naive of me haha

I agree with many others, self study is the way to go, especially if you've got true motivation to acquire the language (and don't need classes for a certain degree).

My Horror Story isn't actually about me, but about a class mate of mine. About two years ago, I signed up for an intensive summer class at my college, where they basically go through a year's curriculum/one textbook in 12 weeks, 3.5 hours a day/ 4-5 days a week. We did hiragana one week, katakana the next and finished Yookoso chapter one in just over three weeks, and arrive at the first major test, having took middle school and high school Japanese, I do the test in 15 minutes and walk out with the others who have had previous instruction/half japanese kids. Long story short we walk back in after taking a long break, and this one woman is having a nervous break down. The test is in all kana, and she couldn't decode/read fast enough to finish in the time allotted, it was a sad sight she had tears in her eyes and everything.

I say this not to make fun of this woman, but because it caused me to reevaluate a couple of things. One learning Japanese is hard, especially at the pace some of in J-Learning community go at. I'll admit the first thing I thought was "it's only kana, this woman is stupid, but then I remembered I had known kana since 7th grade, and had learned at a pace of five a week, something that to this day I remain grateful for. Two Elitism runs rampant in the J-Learning community. After this little incident other people in the class, myself included on a couple of occasions would make fun of her every now and then, and it just wasn't cool.

P.S I'll explain what I mean by Elitism
If you finish Heisig in 5 weeks, or learn twice as much grammar than the rest of the class does congragulations. You're a dedicated, hardworking individual you deserve to be proud of your accomplishment. If you use these accomplishments to look down and snub your nose at everbody who isn't on your level, you're an elitist. I could type for pages about the Elitism, or real student/ fan mentality in Japanese classes that I have been in, but I think I made my point.

I guess I was lucky with my one university level beginning Japanese class. I went into it with no prior knowledge of Japanese at all and I thought the pace was reasonable. (I'm sure people on this forum will think it was slow though...)

We used Nakama 1 and finished the text during the year. We started with hiragana in the first week or so, at some point added katakana and around 100 kanji. One of the strengths of the course was that we had a LOT of listening assignments - the text came with a set of something like 12 cds, I don't remember exactly. There were a lot of different voices, so we couldn't get used to the sound of one person's Japanese. It covered a decent amount of practical vocab and sentence structures and the teacher was very good with explaining grammar and pronunciation. By the end we were somewhere between the old JLPT 4 and 3 - missing a few bits of grammar/vocab from 4 but also knowing stuff that wasn't covered until 3.

Since then I've done mainly self study but it did give me a good foundation.

leonl Wrote:My Horror Story isn't actually about me, but about a class mate of mine. About two years ago, I signed up for an intensive summer class at my college, where they basically go through a year's curriculum/one textbook in 12 weeks, 3.5 hours a day/ 4-5 days a week. We did hiragana one week, katakana the next and finished Yookoso chapter one in just over three weeks, and arrive at the first major test, having took middle school and high school Japanese, I do the test in 15 minutes and walk out with the others who have had previous instruction/half japanese kids. Long story short we walk back in after taking a long break, and this one woman is having a nervous break down. The test is in all kana, and she couldn't decode/read fast enough to finish in the time allotted, it was a sad sight she had tears in her eyes and everything.

I say this not to make fun of this woman, but because it caused me to reevaluate a couple of things. One learning Japanese is hard, especially at the pace some of in J-Learning community go at. I'll admit the first thing I thought was "it's only kana, this woman is stupid, but then I remembered I had known kana since 7th grade, and had learned at a pace of five a week, something that to this day I remain grateful for. Two Elitism runs rampant in the J-Learning community. After this little incident other people in the class, myself included on a couple of occasions would make fun of her every now and then, and it just wasn't cool.

P.S I'll explain what I mean by Elitism
If you finish Heisig in 5 weeks, or learn twice as much grammar than the rest of the class does congragulations. You're a dedicated, hardworking individual you deserve to be proud of your accomplishment. If you use these accomplishments to look down and snub your nose at everbody who isn't on your level, you're an elitist. I could type for pages about the Elitism, or real student/ fan mentality in Japanese classes that I have been in, but I think I made my point.

I don't like people who think there are better then everyone else, talk about ignorance but wonder if I am an elitist? I learned RTK volume 1+3 in 3 months and I gain good listening skills in 6 months, I gained advanced reading/listening skills in 1.5 years. Now I'm heading into the 3 year mark later this year and my speaking is picking up. That leaves writing which isn't as hard as I thought it would be(srs is key here).

I've learned that you need to test your limits at some point, some people can easily handle hundreds of srs reps daily, while others go for only immersion/speaking practice. For me, all I want is: enjoy what I'm doing, doing it in a productive fashion and just keep going.

ta121121,
I wish I had the time/dedication you do, but right now I just don't have the motivation to do so much work, the most I do a week is 10 Kanji, 70 Words, plus the 1000 or so review cards that come up in anki. It doesn't make you elitist if you can accomplish in 1.5 years, what it takes others 4-5 years. It makes you elitist if you use this to look down on everyone. I agree people should test their limits. I use to do 25 new cards+reviews for all four anki decks I had, this gave me days where I had upwards of 300 cards to do, it was too much, especially if I skipped a day, so I had to drastically reduce the number of cards I do per day in order to stay motivated and on track.

leonl Wrote:My Horror Story isn't actually about me, but about a class mate of mine. About two years ago, I signed up for an intensive summer class at my college, where they basically go through a year's curriculum/one textbook in 12 weeks, 3.5 hours a day/ 4-5 days a week. We did hiragana one week, katakana the next and finished Yookoso chapter one in just over three weeks, and arrive at the first major test, having took middle school and high school Japanese, I do the test in 15 minutes and walk out with the others who have had previous instruction/half japanese kids. Long story short we walk back in after taking a long break, and this one woman is having a nervous break down. The test is in all kana, and she couldn't decode/read fast enough to finish in the time allotted, it was a sad sight she had tears in her eyes and everything.

Err the real story here is they don't know how to teach, combined with an adult's natural fear of incompetence. The fact she was in the same class and expected to do the same test as people who already knew kana and the material of the first chapter is ridiculous. Your peers' skill level should encourage competitiveness in you, not totally demoralise you. Also, tests should be about determining what needs to be revised, not testing people's performance. The teacher should have already known that woman would fail and not do the test. Sadly, many teachers seem to do the "broadcast" style of teaching combined with impersonal testing. Class size often has a lot to do with it: our intensive classes were 2-5 people.

It's the AJATT idea (or he ripped it off, whatever, i first saw it there) that you should aim to fail, but make the price of failure cheap. Doesn't sound like that woman considered it a cheap failure.

At my university kanji weren't tested in the exam(!) and electronic dictionaries were used. The Japanese guy was the only person who realized how ridiculous it was and called me into his office. He sighed and looked out of the window, checking that nobody was there

"I was one the people who wanted kanji in the exam - they are trying to bring it in line with European languages". He basically said he would write me a letter to anyone stating that I could read 2000 kanji perfectly and that I got a degree without going to Japan which he said was a 'miracle'.

People who weren't serious passed cos they spent years in Japan and that upset people. In all fairness I really liked individual teachers but the system defo knocked years off my Japanese ability.

There should have been a different class, I'll agree with that, but Japanese isn't a high priority at this school, and so everyone takes the same first year class, whether you have previous ability or not. I also suffered a bit of demoralizing, there were people in this class who had lived in Japan for 13 years because their parents were military and they went to Japanese schools, and learned the languge, so no matter who you were in this class, there was always somebody just miles ahead of you, made you feel like you were on your own (This was at my community college, at my university the levels evened out a bit). You couldn't really study with anybody, people were either to far behind or far ahead of you to make you feel comfortable working with them.

leonl Wrote:...there were people in this class who had lived in Japan for 13 years because their parents were military and they went to Japanese schools, and learned the languge

Why were they taking a Japanese class in the first place? Isn't it a bit pointless?

pudding cat Wrote:

leonl Wrote:...there were people in this class who had lived in Japan for 13 years because their parents were military and they went to Japanese schools, and learned the languge

Why were they taking a Japanese class in the first place? Isn't it a bit pointless?

Easy credits, most colleges require you to take 1-2 years of foreign language in order to graduate. The only people who get screened out are native speakers of that language, and sometimes they even manage to fly under the radar. If you spoke fluent Japanese, would you rather suffer through Spanish or French, or basically give yourself a free A. A few schools in my state, mostly the University of Washington do have different first year classes for native/ bi-lingual speakers, that are more writing intensive, because a lot of these people seem to be lacking in the writing department, but this is the UW is the exception, not the norm.

I studied for a couple of months at a local Japanese language school. It was full of Koreans and Taiwanese, who were great, but there was an American nerd there who ruined the class for everyone. One day we did drills asking for advice. I was paired with him, and I asked "I can't sleep very well. What should I do?" "You should commit seppuku" was his advice. Then in English he said "You know what seppuku is, right?" I told him to shut the ***** up before he got started. His Japanese was crap because he became flushed with shame and anger whenever someone tried to correct him, because, of course, he knew everything. Dunno, it seems like everywhere you go here there is an American guy with Asperger's who loves manga and can't wait to teach us about it.
None of them on this site though, I'm sure.

There are some great points on this thread. I understand that some language faculties are restrained by university regulations, and sometimes even the pressure to pass students so that they don't lose your tuition payments.

Personally, I think that no matter how terrible the class, teacher or curriculum, any Japanese course or class is only what you make it. I've been to terrible privately run lessons that have sucked, and University run courses that have not been much better. I went to an 'intermediate' class once where students didn't know how to make te form of verbs, which was a surprise- but maybe I learnt that early?!

However, I am now studying at a UK university and the quality of the lectures and practicals is extremely high, absolutely the best tuition I have ever received. The staff are incredibly knowledgeable native speakers, who are firm but fair and really expect all students to pull their weight. Kanji have been drilled and tested from the outset with weekly quizzes which count towards assessment. We are learning 40 kanji per week for the tests at a minimum. (One of the classes requires about 200 vocabulary words once a fortnight on top of the kanji). Lessons are conducted almost entirely in Japanese (if someone is really not getting something the teacher may momentarily switch to English), and the students are all expected to try to say something first in Japanese at all times.

But regardless of all of that, the person who actually has to do the work is yourself. I firmly believe that you can't be 'taught' a language. You can be shown the way, given the advice and guidance needed, but when it comes down to it learning a language is just plain work (even if you use the immersion route you have to work relatively hard in the set up and motivation to keep the momentum going). I think of class as a basis for my own study. By working towards the essays and exams for that, I am working towards my own longer term goals. (I suppose motivation is a key aspect too- it can be hard to stay motivated in a bad class).

Having said that if a class really is terrible (and I have been to my fair share of those), it's probably counter productive to spend your time there. I would rather study independently in that situation.

As for the Seppuku guy in Mennon's post - there's one in every class! Can't get away from them! Not sure about the asperger's part though :-)

Aren't most undergraduate courses just degree conveyor belts for making money off students (especially in America)? In that case it's no surprise courses in any subject go so slowly at a lot of places.

It seems like at public universities in mainland Europe where profits aren't the incentive, the faculty can raise standards to what is appropriate for "full time education" without having to worry about unmotivated students dropping out.

dizmox Wrote:Aren't most undergraduate courses just degree conveyor belts for making money off students (especially in America)?

Yes. Yes they are. *goes back to lurking*

jankensan Wrote:However, I am now studying at a UK university and the quality of the lectures and practicals is extremely high, absolutely the best tuition I have ever received.

Guess I picked the wrong Uni.. I get 2 hours of class a week, and most of that's in English.. lucky I study by myself anyway and I'm only studying it as a class for the degree otherwise I'd be useless if it was my only learning method.

jankensan Wrote:As for the Seppuku guy in Mennon's post - there's one in every class! Can't get away from them! Not sure about the asperger's part though :-)

Ofc, Me and an Aussie friend used to do random shit like that all the time last year on exchange. Trying our best to give the stupidest answer possible in order to make the teacher laugh. 3 items on a desert island, from a list the teacher chose... we choose A knife, A dog and rope.

A knife, general survival
The Dog, companionship.. and dinner.. we have a knife to carve it.
A rope.. to end it all, if we got too lonely.

Everyone else gave super serious answers.. we nearly cracked the teacher with carving up the dog for dinner.. and the rope broke her into laughter.. 1-0 us.


I loved my class in Japan, all Japanese, tests every class, 3 hours of learning stuff (3x a week). Back home.. I mite as well take a manga and a notebook for as much as I learn. This semester I think I learnt maybe a handful of words I didn't know before. Waste of my time really.

leonl Wrote:ta121121,
I wish I had the time/dedication you do, but right now I just don't have the motivation to do so much work, the most I do a week is 10 Kanji, 70 Words, plus the 1000 or so review cards that come up in anki. It doesn't make you elitist if you can accomplish in 1.5 years, what it takes others 4-5 years. It makes you elitist if you use this to look down on everyone. I agree people should test their limits. I use to do 25 new cards+reviews for all four anki decks I had, this gave me days where I had upwards of 300 cards to do, it was too much, especially if I skipped a day, so I had to drastically reduce the number of cards I do per day in order to stay motivated and on track.

Do what you can, then you will progress. My progress will be different than other people but remember that I'm still learning. There is still a lot of flaws in my japanese, so i still am learning. It's hard to keep going at times, i can honestly admit that. The motivation it takes is sometimes so high at times. It's because no matter what phase your in, your going to be still learning. Most people say just keep going and you will eventually reach your goal. My goal is still at the 5 year mark but as it fast approaches, I wonder what I will think once I reach that mark. It's just one of those things that I will know once I reach that mark.

I am currently enrolled in second semester Intermediate Japanese at my Uni as a freshman (placed into it). We are using the 上級への扉 textbook and, like someone mentioned earlier in the thread, it's really good quality (from what we've done so far). It's also heavily focused on reading, which I like, so I'm quite good at it.

I don't have much to go on since the only other Japanese class I took was for 8 months, one or two hours every weekend back when I was 13, so I don't know how relevant this will be. But someone said that the class moves as slow as the slowest person, and that's pretty true. I don't know what the normal speaking ability should be at this point, but there is a range of them in class, from people who speak relatively well to people who stumble over every other word. No one speaks perfectly of course, not even me, but the course doesn't seem to emphasize conversation, which really bugs me, because that's what I want to do. They drill vocab and most of the time we're sitting back listening to the professors talk.

Kanji wise I'm not sure how to gauge everyone's level, but we have Kanji practice and Kanji quizzes, and people seem to be able to read most of them fine. None of them are doing RTK, and when I talk to other classmates they always moan about how hard and difficult Kanji are to read and understand. (I usually just keep my mouth shut - thanks to Heisig, I don't find them hard at all, I actually find them rather easy and manageable.) When we read in class, some of them still stumble over hiragana, and I'm not sure if that's normal for this level or not?

They drill a lot of grammar that I've picked up intuitively over the past few years. The only thing is, our profs *force* us to use the grammar we've learned, sometimes ignoring the students who don't use the grammar pattern. I know this isn't necessarily a bad thing, they're trying to teach you and they think the best way to learn is through repetition, but it's really frustrating when you're looked over for not speaking the way the textbook describes.

So for me, it's just frustrating being back in a classroom setting when I've been kind of freelancing my way through Japanese for a bit, so the "Everyone repeat after me!" with everyone talking as slowly as possible kind of grates on my nerves. (And the stupid projects. God, I completely forgot about the stupid projects.) And it feels like it's moving at a snails pace - 上級への扉 has around 20 chapters, and we'll only be going through 5 this semester (again, I don't know if that's really slow or not, but it feels like it to me.) Although it has provided me some structure, teachers to correct my mistakes, and an incentive to get through my kanjichains and all that. Really I'm just taking it because I wanted to, and I'm not stressing too much about the class because I'm focusing more on finding people who speak Japanese who I can practice with, and I think that's one good thing that the class has done. (So many Japanese speaking friends now!)

Also, one other thing that saddened me is that a lot of people I talk to don't seem to be interested in Japan itself. Some people went over there and then came back and decided to take it, others are just using it to fulfill a foreign language requirement. One person taking it told me he had absolutely no interest in Japanese culture, and that he actually hated some of it. I personally could not understand why you would take a language who's culture you hate - not saying that he shouldn't, just that I couldn't do that. And I haven't met anyone who listens to the music, or reads their books, or stays on NicoNico Douga like an addict everyday (like me lol). So it does make it a little hard to not have any one to talk to in class about what's going on in Japan, because none of them really care ;-; Or maybe I just haven't found those who do. It's only been a few weeks, after all.

p.s. Funny thing is, my teachers actually recommended Anki as a great flash card system, but no one is using it, and I don't think they know they can do it to learn Kanji quicker and easier

jankensan Wrote:But regardless of all of that, the person who actually has to do the work is yourself. I firmly believe that you can't be 'taught' a language. You can be shown the way, given the advice and guidance needed, ...

Let me tell you that this is true for everything to be learned in life, from science and engineering to art and politics, not only languages.

This is why graduates quality is decreasing, and it's also the reason the best universities are the best, because of their students (mostly).

I love giving stupid / funny answers in class.

One of my favorites was filling in the following.
_______ても、何もしません。

I said
チカンに触られても、何もしません。

チカンand 触る were vocab words in Genki 2 so I expected everyone to laugh but I just got blank stares, probably 'cause they didn't study.

The teacher said "Yeah, I guess that's what would happen in real Japan."

Everyone in class was so serious and dry by giving by-the-book answers...
Then during breaks they'd talk about anime.
Man, why doesn't anyone want to have fun?

(I also remember saying なんでやねん in my shitty　なんちゃってOsakan accent to complain about something and only the teacher and the Japanese student laughed. Man...)

Mennon Wrote:I was paired with him, and I asked "I can't sleep very well. What should I do?" "You should commit seppuku" was his advice.

Hahaha! That definitely sounds like something I would say!

Gingerninja Wrote:A knife, general survival
The Dog, companionship.. and dinner.. we have a knife to carve it.
A rope.. to end it all, if we got too lonely.

Just...genius XD

As for classes, I hate them. Hate AAALLLL the classes. American "education" is a joke, at least after elementary school. I was so burnt out after finishing college last semester that I literally spent the last two months just recovering. I understand that some people do quite well in the current system, but that doesn't mean the system isn't broken. I am very much a person who needs to work at my own pace. My whole college career I've gotten compliments from professors on my speaking and writing ability, and several times have been told that I'm much too intelligent for my grades to suck as badly as they do. And Oh, how they suck. I barely passed more than a few classes, and I failed my first class ever while in college. This was despite the fact that I was taking very interesting classes with very intelligent professors whom I liked.

So here I am, a fairly sharp guy who displays a high level of competence in class but who bombs tests and rarely turns homework in on time. It doesn't matter if I understand the material better than most of my classmates, it doesn't matter if I'm able to process on a higher level than students of "the system." All that matters is getting the grade, which usually takes a combination of memorization and guesswork to figure out what the professor is going to test on (and hey, guess what I'm notoriously bad at!).

So I'll be the first to say "screw school!", but if you're one of the people who can make it work for you, by all means make the most of it. As for me, I'll stick to AJATT and actually have FUN learning Japanese, the way God intended.

zigmonty Wrote:Also, tests should be about determining what needs to be revised, not testing people's performance.

This is a profound statement, one which I have believed for years but could never quite put into words. Thank you for expressing this thought.

LivingNexus Wrote:So here I am, a fairly sharp guy who displays a high level of competence in class but who bombs tests and rarely turns homework in on time. It doesn't matter if I understand the material better than most of my classmates, it doesn't matter if I'm able to process on a higher level than students of "the system." All that matters is getting the grade, which usually takes a combination of memorization and guesswork to figure out what the professor is going to test on (and hey, guess what I'm notoriously bad at!).

You're notoriously bad at doing homework, which is not a good excuse for anything.

If you claim to know the material then actually doing the work should be really easy. And in the real world, someone who doesn't understand the topic as well will always lose to someone who does the work.

"80% of success is showing up." - Woody Allen

It's one thing to blame class for a lack of success in real situations, but it's another thing when you admit that you don't do homework on time and complain that school sucks because of that.

@ AkiKazachan

I noticed that you are taking Japanese classes in Georgia, you wouldn't happen to be at the same university as me would you? (University of Georgia) I'm in 4th year classes now.

Most of the people here that aren't really interested in Japanese are weeded out by 3rd year courses. And if they aren't, they are pretty noticeably hanging in there for dear life. The people who stick to their Anki decks faithfully are definitely the ones that always end up doing best. If you are in my area, I could introduce you to Japanese people if you like.

@ Hashiriya

Ah, while I do live in GA, I'm currently at school out of state.

Yeah, there's constant talk outside of class amongst my classmates about how they're thinking of dropping out. The most complaint is about kanji/grammar. I talk to them sometimes about how I study, but none of them use Anki (they find it impossible that I actually like kanji D: ) and they don't immerse themselves outside of class. So, they're getting no outside exposure to the language at all.