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I am an English teacher. I have been teaching for 1.5 years and have a teaching qualification (CELTA). I have read books about teaching and take it pretty seriously.

I have recently started studying Japanese at Yamasa, a school in Okazaki that has a very good reputation. I had hopes that they would be good because of this, but whilst they are above volunteer teachers, they fundamanetally operate under broken principles.

In any class, the teacher does about 90% of the speaking and we all do about 1% each. Classes are very grammar focused and generally very boring. This is kind of funny, since we all have good grammar, but generally suck at speaking. (Generally an accepted good ration is 30% teacher and 70% students, but I try and push it beyond this).

I believe that Japanese schools/teachers that understand good language teaching principles are very rare. Well I have never come across one, and I have had about 20 different teachers over the whole course of studying Japanese. I think a big part of it is they naturally tend to teach how they were taught in high school, which is to say in a very teacher centric and boring way. I also think they English teaching is a massive industry and so the techniques have advanced beyond other languages, not that the principles are any different.

My advice is don't go to school, unless you can take a trial lesson and you actually speak. As in speak to other students while the teacher moniters, thus allowing students to get a lot of speaking practice. However, I doubt you will find a school or teacher like this.

If I was you I would make more Japanese friends, do language exchange or something. If you want motivation, put yourself in situations where you have to rely on your Japanese and it will develop. Also use Anki, you have daily reviews and you have to do them or give up basically, as they will just keep piling up and getting worse and worse.

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On the other hand, Japanese schools are a great way to make foreign friends who don't speak English, so you can practice Japanese a lot with them.

Well, I generally believe that studying in a class is not so usefull, even if taught perfectly. I think it is faster learning grammar and vocab by yourself and class being used to get this learnt grammar and vocab into an active and usable state. I also agree with the AJATT principle that input is more important than output.

However, I teach many students who do no study outside of class and I generally have to assume this is the case. I also have to make sure they know or have learnt the grammar of the lesson I am teaching, since they need to show they know it to move to the next level at my school.

There are number of major principles that are important in good teaching and many more minor ones.

1. STT (student talking time) VS TTT (teacher talking time). STT should be maximised as much as possible. The more students talk the more they improve and enjoy themselves. Students want to talk, more than half of a teachers job is setting up situations where they have approatiely challenging things to say.

2. Go from accuracy to fluency. At the start of the lesson some grammar, vocab or reading is practiced. The focus at the start is to use or interpret with accuracy. Accuracy as in students have no choice in what they say. IE say they are practicing paste tense, they pick up a card and make a sentence "I went to Italy". All mistakes are corrected. Then move into study that is freer. They pick up a card that says "go" then have to make a past tense sentence.

Finally, they are told yesterday was the best day of their life and they need to talk about it with their partner. They think about their perfect day, then talk about it with their partner who asks questions for more information. There is complete freedom. No mistakes are corrected as the focus is fluency and having a real conversation. There is also the goal here to personalise the language, use it for a real purpose. This the best practice because it isn't practice at all. It is also much more fun and satisfying to use language for a real purpose.

It also serves to integrate the language learnt into their other langauge. They say things like "I ate a delicious hamburger" (adding an adjective).

3. Contextualise. Grammar and vocab are boring. Stories real situations are not. Have a theme for the lesson, use pictures, anything to create a theme that is palpable. This takes quite a lot preparation of time and unfortunately I can't often do it. They lessons I use don't follow this principle and I don't have the time to change them so much to work in a theme, but I do my best.

4. Have a start a middle and an end. The start is the warm up. It needs to be fun and have all the students talking (Asking the class how their weekend was is about the worst example I can think of). Typically it leads into the theme of the lesson. It sets the tone of the lesson as well, so its very important. The middle is the teaching and practice. The end is a rounding up, usually students talking together and hopefully using the language they learnt.

5. Elicit. As a rule, you should never tell the students something they can tell you. Students love saying what they know and it is a way to involve them in the teaching going through new language part of the lesson.

6. Pronunciation should be taught, drilled and corrected. Not exactly a major principle, but it is blaringly absent from most language classes. I often struggle to understand my class mates because of poor pronunciation, but the teachers do nothing about it.

These are the main ideals. There are many more techniques and such but that would make for a long post. This contrasts to the high school methodology which I am taught Japanese under which is:

The teacher talks for the whole time and occasionally asks us a question or to read something. There is no start or end, we just study grammar, finish that, study more grammar and so on. There is no pronunciation work. There is very little eliciting, although this is one thing that some Japanese teachers will do to a certain degree. We very rarely speak to each other and if so it is rarely anything remotely interesting. The teacher is always in complete control. We also never move, something which I am a big fan of in lessons.

I'm a teacher too, and I've got teaching qualifications and I've done CELTA as well.  I've also taught in Asia and in Australia, and it is totally different.  In Asia, you are not really allowed to do what you are taught, like all those things thermal said, you just can't, it's 'not serious enough', whatever that means.

However in Australia, my school was completely geared towards student practice, speaking, pron, eliciting, maximising student language use time, etc.  It was far more effective, students who are usually already full of grammar and words from their previous study can suddenly speak clearly and well.  So I would recommend perhaps doing a Japanese class in a Western country over Japan, but you still need to see how it's taught.

Khatzumemo is always complaining about language classes and things like that, and I used to take it quite personally, because my classes and my school were nothing like that.  It is English all the time for our students, lots of practice, lots of non-text authentic language lessons made by the teachers, grammar was only an elective.  Three to four hours speaking practice a day, and then go home and self study, passive input, homework, vocabulary learning etc.

You know, Khatz is a bit of a live wire, but I wish he wouldn't have characterised all lessons as equal to his bad experiences.  I mean I didn't write a blog about it or anything, but the only revelation for me in AJATT was the SRS and Heisig.  The passive input idea was already quite established in the language education world.  Personally, if I had the choice of self study only, or study in a good school, then I would prefer the school, if only for all the speaking practice.

Tobberoth went to a language school in Japan which he seemed to think was very useful, perhaps message him or he might comment here.

It's not Audio-Lingual, that's fallen a bit out of favour, it's just a bunch of techniques these days.  Thermal outlined the important ones, but it could be summed up as 'maximising student language use time'.  You just force them to use the language they already know in as many different ways as possible.  On the side, you introduce new vocab, structures, i+1 materials, etc.  There is not so much drilling, more like the teacher gives lots of examples, then the students use the structure in a controlled, accuracy-important activity, and afterwards in a more free and fluent activity.

At home you encourage 'whatever language all the time', and hopefully the school makes available many materials, like novels, newspapers, songs, audio books, magazines, computers, and other media for them to consume.  We also had an hour a day when they have to self study, they have to stay at the school an extra hour and do some input.  My first lesson every month was trying to encourage them to use English as much as possible, such as live with a native housemate, watch dramas, suggesting books to read which were level appropriate. etc.

Another thing was giving them skills homework, where I would kind of set them a mission, a bit like Fight Club.  So I'd have them ask ten strangers in the street what the time was, for beginners, and more advanced would do things like ask for directions to a certain place.  I'd set it as homework with a sheet to note down what the stranger said, and what they planned to say, etc.  At first I just asked them to talk to strangers, but they never did it, but as soon as it was homework, they would pretty much all do it.

I take Japanese at University in Australia (Melbourne Uni), and it's similar to what phauna's talking about. The majority of class time is conversation with classmates and the teacher eliciting responses to questions related to the grammar. It sounds good, but it's abysmally awful. Here's why:

1) Nobody bothers to study the grammar, or at least, most people don't. Students are incredibly apathetic. I think most of them took Japanese in high school when language class was compulsory and they don't realise they can STOP now.

2) They suck, and if they suck worse than me they can't tell me when I make a mistake.

3) They suck, so I have to dumb myself down. This means: NO grammar or vocab we haven't covered in class. I've had times where I've had to say something non grammatical just because it was simpler.

4) Inane roleplays. "Student A wants to mail a package with the following contents, Student B is a mail clerk" ughhhh shoot me

5) Probably 80% of the time when the teacher asks someone a question, they either don't understand the question or they don't know how to answer. Cue several painful minutes of the answer being given bit by bit until they get it. This isn't bad for my learning I guess but it does make me want to ram my head through a wall.

phauna wrote:

At home you encourage 'whatever language all the time' [...] My first lesson every month was trying to encourage them to use English as much as possible, such as live with a native housemate, watch dramas, suggesting books to read which were level appropriate. etc.

THIS is what's missing I think, and the difference between your good experiences and my awful ones. I don't think the fact that there's a Japanese section with manga etc on the top floor of our library has ever been mentioned. Probably because of low expectations. The other week I heard a native teacher tell a student 8 years was a reasonable timeframe for learning the kanji. Although given most people don't even bother to read the textbook maybe it wouldn't help.

I think this is my longest post ever but it's a situation that really gets to me. I take the subject because it's credited towards my degree and it's required for language scholarship. Ultimately it doesn't matter how good the teacher's methods are if the students aren't willing to put in the time outside of class.

A couple of points. I think it is fair to make the generalisation that the Japanese are poor at teaching languages. Because they are not taught how to do it well at university. I have had many teachers who have been to university and have many years experience, but they don't receive good teaching fundamentals from either. Further more, they don't know it. They seem to think they have it down and can't improve much more.

A video was taken of one of the most teacher centric teachers to be used for training purposes at my school. She is apparently to them the ideal teacher since she has very strong control over the class and conversely we do almost nothing. (It could have been for her benefit though and they just didn't want to tell us that).

I was taught by some volunteer teachers once and I offered to give them a sample lesson to show them how they can be more effective as teachers. Unfortunately we couldn't find a time that we were all available, but I asked one of them to invite the head teacher who was guiding the junior teachers to join us, and I was told "oh? but she knows everything already".

So I think given that the universities are teaching flawed principles and methodologies then it is reasonable to make this generalisation.

Also, I think that unless you have learnt how to teach or have read the fundamentals, then you don't know what a good teacher is. When I started learning Japanese I thought my first teacher was good. Then a got a new teacher who was so much better and realised that she wasn't good at all. Then I learnt about language teaching and I realised that my current teacher also wasn't good.

I think this typically comes from students mistaking fun as learning. I love Japanese, learning and classrooms so almost any teacher could make me happy in this way, but really good teaching is not so obvious.

thermal wrote:

A couple of points. I think it is fair to make the generalisation that the Japanese are poor at teaching languages...

Also, I think that unless you have learnt how to teach or have read the fundamentals, then you don't know what a good teacher is...

Hello Zelotype,

Given all the negative posts about Japanese teachers, it seems unlikely that you will find a good Japanese school in Japan (sorry about that!). 

Furthermore, unless you have studied the fundamentals of teaching, you may not be qualified to tell what a good teacher is (double sorry about that!).

I don't agree with either of these points, but it's a waste of time to argue.

I hope you are not discouraged by these posts, and you find a good Japanese school in Japan.  Good luck!

<Edit - added>
Oh, and one other small point - I think improving my Japanese is more important than taking the JLPT, too.  But I find that studying for the JLPT helps me learn Japanese grammar and vocabulary, so why not do it?  It's analogous to the fact that I will never win a running race, but by training for it, I improve my health - that's a good enough reason for me.  Don't hold yourself back.

Last edited by kfmfe04 (2008 November 10, 3:28 am)

phauna wrote:

Personally, if I had the choice of self study only, or study in a good school, then I would prefer the school, if only for all the speaking practice.

Me, too!  Finding a 'good school' is the problem.

It's worse for me, here in the US, I'm sure...  But the classes around here are a joke.  I decided a while back that I'm -much- better off learning on my own.  I can fit it into my schedule around other things...  I can focus on things that I see I'm bad at...  And I'm not held back by anyone else.  My speed in learning is -far- in excess of what I'd expect in a class.  (I took Spanish in Highschool for a couple years, so I'm not just imagining this.)

In addition, I'm learning -useful- things for me.  My goals are to learn to read easy manga, then hard manga, then books.  Along the way, I want to learn to converse with others by writing and speaking.  The internet provides great resources for both...  Much better than I'd find in a class with 1 fluent (possibly native) speaker and a bunch of beginners.

Keep in mind, I'm actually spending less time each day my way, but learning more.  I could supplement a class with the other non-class things I do, but that would take even more time.  With my crazy schedule, time is the one thing I need most.

Hi Zoletype,

Thanks for giving us a little of your background.  I, too, have taught students in the past, and I believe it's much harder than people think (especially, the larger/the more diverse a class is).

Coincidentally, studying for the JLPT, whether you decide to take the test or not, is actually excellent training for grammar and vocabulary.  By your description, listening will probably be too easy for you, and skip JLPT3 and JLPT4 - start at JLPT2.  For many people, taking the JLPT2 is a humbling experience.

Here is my suggestion:

GRAMMAR - go to a bookstore and take a look.  I like UNICOM for its conciseness - depending on your preferences, you may like KANZEN MASTER, or some of the other series.  どんな時どう使う日本語表現文型辞典 is excellent as a reference.  UNICOM has a CD that you can listen to all day to drill the patterns into your head.

VOCABULARY - if you have not completed RTK1 yet, get the book and use RevTK for review and stories.  Whatever you do, finish RTK1 and exorcise the Kanji-demon.  This should actually keep you busy for a few months.  If you get bored doing RTK1, try using this site:  http://www.readthekanji.com/
for practicing JLPT vocabulary readings.    It will make your study of vocabulary go much more smoothly.
For practice reading real material, I often use http://www.popjisyo.com in conjunction with http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl but I'm sure you have your own favorite ways of reading.  Of course, if you tie all this in by watching your favorite TV programs (I use Japanese subtitles, but if you can do without, even better...).

Both of these you can do WITHOUT a school or a teacher.  Now, for the 10% or so in grammar that is hard to pick up on your own, this is where a tutor who has some training in teaching grammar will come in handy.  They will be able to clarify the examples and answer any questions.

Don't wait - start studying on your own and fit the school/curriculum in later - a desire to learn is too valuable to waste...

Last edited by kfmfe04 (2008 November 10, 1:45 pm)

Pillow Talk is the best lesson plan.  Get a Japanese boyfriend/girlfriend.  Save the money you would have spent on classes and enjoy the Japanese culture with it.  I agree with  Mr. Heisig.  Only dead languages should be learned in a classroom.

C'est drole.

"Dead languages should not be learned in the classroom either!"