There are a few topics here on language courses, but I thought I might start a topic specifically on short-term intensive courses.

I would like to go to Tokyo and take an intensive course for about 4-6 weeks (already have a Homestay), and my level is probably low intermediate/intermediate. I've mostly studied on my own, but I thought such a course could be pretty useful. Also since I prefer studying kanji on my own I'd rather not focus on them in class.

One course I've discovered is on this website, " http://www.studyjapanesejapan.com/learn-tokyo.html ". It seems to be at the same place as the Academy of Language Arts ( http://www.ala-japan.com/english/30.html ) , so I assume they are the same.
Has any one had any experience with this school? Thus far I've been unable to find a reliable-looking review.

From the forum and the websites I've also seen that Human Academy and the ARC Academy could be possibilities because they have flexible entry dates and I haven't read too many major complaints about them (though one minus for the Human).

The issue is that I would probably be jumping into some course after it has already started, and I wonder how much I would be able to get out of it... has anyone experienced this with a short-term course before?

I currently attend ISI Language school in Takadanobaba and it's a really good school and I'd recommend it. Not sure how their short-term sessions work though.

Where are you going to be staying in Tokyo?

A few years ago I took a short course at ALA, and although I have little basis for comparison, I was very happy with it. The teachers were very nice and generally very competent.

They will assess your level in a short test and then stick you into the right level course. At least in my case they mostly got it right: put me in the highest level first because of my kanji knowledge, I guess --- thanks to RTK---but then realized that I needed to go into the third-highest level, mostly with students who had just passed JLPT2.

They follow a set curriculum, so if you haven't taken any classes with them before, it doesn't really matter when you jump in. But I would probably try to join at the start date of a term, for the social aspect of it... it'll be easier to make friends then. There seemed to be a lot of Korean (rather than only Chinese) students there at the time, which I liked because their Japanese is better, especially the pronunciation, and you will mostly be speaking Japanese with them after all.

However I'd echo what many people have said here before: a language course is probably not the best use of your time and money compared to the resources here. Perhaps doing a longer homestay would be better, but then try to study hard during the day when you're there?

With hindsight I would only take courses for level N2/N1 grammar and for 作文 because then you really need to have a good teacher correct your mistakes.