I am looking to go to a language school for around a year and was hoping to hear some opinions about the schools people have gone to. There are way too many of them, and they all seem roughly the same. None of them (except yamasa) have much information. They generally cost the same amount of money too.

CILA, Yamasa, ISI, Naganuma, Toyo Gaigo, AILC - I dont even know where to start.
I've checked the 2009 records for the schools and everyone seems to have the same ~50% pass/fail rate for N1 and N2. What I dont quite get is why most of the schools have classes taking 9 months to pass N4. That seems far too long.

Despite the nice big cheap apartments Yamasa has to offer, I think I would prefer to stick around Tokyo. Unfortunately, all the schools I am interested in seem to offer nothing but dorms and guest houses. I dont look forward to the prospect of waiting in line to take a shower so that is no good.

Feel free to share your experiences.

...And I realize going to a language school is unnecessary to learn Japanese, but its also a nice easy way to live in Japan for a year without having to work.

My advice would be to also consider places outside of Tokyo. Okazaki doesn't sound like an interesting place, but if you find anything in places like Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto, or Fukuoka, go for it. Probably you can live for a lot better for a lot cheaper than in Tokyo, and those cities are just as fun.

I went to ARC Academy (http://en.arc-academy.net/) in the Tokyo area a while back. Most of the students were Chinese students there to study for entrance exams, so you're not going to be around a whole bunch of English speakers. I think you can arrange a homestay for a short period of time, and while they do require you to make your own living arrangements, there are links to websites.

Tokyo is expensive, and I would agree that there are cheaper places than Tokyo to learn Japanese. The further you get away from the the big, touristy cities, the more you're going to have to use your Japanese.

I only spent a couple of weeks in Okazaki, so it's hard to say if it would be a place to do a whole year+. That's a tough one. The school is good, and everything there was pretty cheap, though, compared to the rest of the places I went to in Japan, so that's a plus for me.

I'd go back if I could. I had a lot of fun there, and I learned a lot in the short time I was there. It's close to Nagoya (600 yen and 25 minutes will get you there), and Nagoya station is freakin' huge. There's a Kinokunia and a Bic Camera right there, which made me happy, as well as some awesome restaurants around the Station area. You just have to walk around a little bit.

The area of Okazaki around the campus is a little on the dreary side (compared to where I live, anyway), but it grows on you. There's plenty of shops/malls/etc. available in Okazaki, so it's not the Moon or anything. Plus, since you're pretty much in the middle of Japan, geographically, you can go just about anywhere.

ZigZag, the on-campus bar, is a nice place to socialize, though, and it has cheap Guinness on tap, supposedly the cheapest in Japan. Hard to beat that. I learned a lot about 電子辞書 there, actually.

Dorm-wise, the dorms are okay, but I would rather live in an apartment, because I'm done with dorm life.

rich_f Wrote:It's close to Nagoya (600 yen and 25 minutes will get you there), and Nagoya station is freakin' huge. There's a Kinokunia and a Bic Camera right there, which made me happy, as well as some awesome restaurants around the Station area. You just have to walk around a little bit.

This is off topic, but I have a weird impression of Nagoya, haha. I was only there for like two days. We went to a festival at Nagoya-Jo the first night (lots of pretty girls in yukata and a surprisingly good taiko show), then afterward we tried to find a place to drink. But it seems like the drinking scene in Nagoya is really really really geared towards salarymen, so the vast majority of bars were snack/hostess bars or girls bars (along with scattered fashion health places and various other sketchy things).

We went about trying to look for a regular bar, but we didn't have much luck. Surprisingly, some people on the street tried to get us to go into hostess bars (this was only surprising to me because I live in Kyoto, and hostess bars will almost never let foreigners in who are not with Japanese). Eventually we got a good offer of 3,000 yen(~$30) for two hours all-you-can-drink so we went with it. The girl who sat with us was a Romanian blonde woman, she didn't speak English really but her Japanese was quite good.

Anyway, the high point of the night was singing "Dragostea Din Tei" with her in karaoke(that's the 'Mai-ya Hee' song that was an internet meme forever), since, of course, it's in Romanian. I was pretty happy about that. Also, the bar had quite a few people from different places (which explains why they were trying to get foreigners to come in so actively). The guy at the bar was from South America--I can't remember the country right now--and was pretty cool.

But, it was a Thursday or something, so the streets weren't actually covered with salarymen. I imagine on the weekends the bars and streets woulda been covered with them, which would probably have annoyed me, haha.

Anyway, yeah, weird impression. Though, I like that in the main parts of the city the power lines are underground. Most of Kyoto is really ugly, no matter what anyone tells you, partly because of all the awful power lines.

I can recommend the Yoshida Institute (http://www.yosida.com), which is based in the Waseda area of Tokyo. It uses the "natural method" (i.e. all japanese all the time) and aims to take students from complete beginner to university-entrance and JLPT N1 level in 2 years. For beginner courses they follow Minna no Nihongo 1 and 2, and for the first intermediate course they use the new Minna no Nihongo 中級 book. After that they use another textbook.

I've been there for 9 months going from middling-beginner to early intermediate (about JLPT N3), and am completely happy with the school and the teachers. There's more information, and staff and student interviews, at http://gogonihon.com/en/yoshida-institut...seda-tokyo .

Other students say that relative to other schools in Tokyo, such as Kai, it's relatively cheaper (currently about 150,000 yen for 3 months), although I have no direct experience of that myself.

I think you have to sort out your own accomodation though, although the school will be happy to give you advice and help out.

Here's a link to my "Okazaki Photos" set on Flickr from 2007. Not what I'd call overwhelming art-- it's just snapshots of random stuff there, and the walk to and from Yamasa from one of the student dorms.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/richfowler/...356150414/

@Tzadeck Slightly OT, but yeah, Okazaki was pretty bad with power lines all over the place, and the world's most hideous cell phone tower near the school. (Seriously, do they go to a special school to come up with new ways to make this stuff *more* hideous?)

But I noticed a lot of that all over Japan, to be honest, and I wandered from Fukuoka to Sendai. Dunno what's safer for earthquakes-- burying them or putting them on poles-- but it sure would be easier on the eyes to bury more of them.

rich_f Wrote:@Tzadeck Slightly OT, but yeah, Okazaki was pretty bad with power lines all over the place, and the world's most hideous cell phone tower near the school. (Seriously, do they go to a special school to come up with new ways to make this stuff *more* hideous?)

But I noticed a lot of that all over Japan, to be honest, and I wandered from Fukuoka to Sendai. Dunno what's safer for earthquakes-- burying them or putting them on poles-- but it sure would be easier on the eyes to bury more of them.

Well, yeah, the power line problem is really bad, but some cities have a lot of the power lines underground. Certainly Hiroshima and Nagoya have big areas with underline powerlines.

Kyoto is really covered with them bad, except for places like Gion, Kiyamachi, and the area near Heian-Jingu.

One of my friends was telling me that they're above ground because the power companies can make more money off above-ground lines, and they lobbied the government to tax underground lines like crazy to get their way. But, like anything you hear from your friends, this is probably wrong. If anyone knows why it's like this please chime in!

sikieiki, what's your budget for accomodation, living costs and school fees?

I went to Asia Daigaku (strange name) located in the West side of Tokyo for a 1-year intensive program and it was probably the best year of my life. 6 hours a day of class of only Japanese and 3 hours on Saturday, so it was thorough, but unfortunately it wasn't a very high level. Still, we worked on everything for so long that it helped round out the edges. There was also no homework, just tests, so I had loads of free time.

The downside was that I was low on cash and lived in a dorm. Japanese dorms are much stricter than what I was used to back in the states. No girls allowed, 11:00PM curfew everyday of the week, and even a fingerprint scanner to get through the front door! Things got troublesome when I hooked up with a girl from the girl's dorm and decided it'd be a good idea to sneak through her balcony into her room a few nights a week. I had to scramble over the neighbor's fence to do it and apparently they had a sensor on there because at one point they started to hang up signs telling trespassers to get lost. I didn't, and they upped the ante by putting a fishes head on a stick next to the sign!

Eventually I got caught and was almost expelled. Good times, though!

deebo Wrote:sikieiki, what's your budget for accomodation, living costs and school fees?

No fixed budget, though ~700,000 yen for a year tuition and ~ 60,000 to 90,000 yen/month for accommodation seems to be what I can expect to pay.

Almost every school has this hole in the wall, run down dump sort of feel - from images and videos I have seen. The videos and pictures usually have a "vending machine" and "pc corner" with machines from ancient legend. If these are so important to be the highlight of a video, then I certainly have no expectations for the level of education provided.

Although I respect yamasa for providing so much information, photographs, and pictures of almost everything at the place, I am not fond of the idea of okazaki. Tokyo and Kyoto seem to be a better place to go.

Actually, ISI and KICL are my favorite schools at this time. Tokyo and Kyoto respectively. They both seem to have a nice facility. ISI though, it would seem that all the "good" photos of a nice looking modern glass building come from ISI Tokyo, and not ISI Language School. You can click on the ISI Language School on their page and it shows the nice building, but I am pretty sure those photos are from ISI Tokyo. Thats not cool. Dont try to trick me. The ISI Language School is on the second floor of a building and it looks trashy from the videos I have seen.

KICL seems like the nicest place, also being able to share facilities with the arts college. Unfortunately I cant find much feedback on how well their courses go.