So I noticed the other day around school was a poster saying, some Japanese learning classes were starting up, and there was an evening you could go along to find out what it was like,

I figured hey you know I probably need to talk more so if the lessons involve a good amount of conversational Japanese it would be good. So I decided to go along.

First of all it wanted you to register on their site, now I know you kids these days love your flash, but this whole website was a big flash thingy, no text just a big bloaty heavy flash site, it looked pretty, but ran like a dog. This was a warning, it was a hey anyone who uses flash to create a website, can’t be good at anything, I mean its worse than using tables for style! But hey I figured they’re probably really good at japanese and bad at technology or something. So ignored the terrible foreboding of the awful website and signed up…

The session was to start at 6pm, unfortunately the teacher was late like, 3/4 of an hour to an hour. She wasn’t Japanese, she was polish (and she wasn’t Michel Thomas) Though she certainly seemed to be able to speak japanese, and had some kind of degree in it.

I recall a really great quote. From her about her Unique teaching method that utilises POWERPOINT, She said it was “Super Effective” And I was all like, sure and I bet your making sure you get your same type attack bonus as well, not, I’m totally going to roll you with my pikachu.

The problem is I am taught all day in powerpoint, and its not super effective, the power points are not informative its what the lecturer says in between, at best the power point is an aid to memory. Her power points clearly took a lot of time to create because they had stupid animations all over them. And as far as I know you don’t actually get a copy of the power points either, because that would be her super effective method out the window.

Anyway so she starts her presentation late and has to rush through her hook is that somehow we are learning new words, so she teaches us a bunch of words for different countries thats 20 words in japanese you learnt!

Now if we add go to the end you can now says the word for a language thats now 40 words, and if you add jin you can now say a person from this country thats 60 words…. etc.

Then we did some hiragana, e.g. the first 5 letters, some writing of kanjis.

Some rote repetition (which didn’t work well in the 35 people class and not everyone got a chance to speak individually.) 35 people saying watashi wa igirisu* jin desu at the same time really doesn’t have a point.

Anyway I chose not to take part in the lessons, as they did cost some monies and the materials and methods were worse than those I already have access to, so I would only have been paying to make myself go to a lesson once a week for 2 hours.

To be fair if she hadn’t been late it might have gone better, but I figure if you can’t manage something as simple as being on time, how are you going to teach me japanese? Badly I assume!

And ultimately I didn’t see me getting any real Japanese speaking practice better than having conversations to myself, or using rhino spike etc.

It seemed to me the whole point of the lessons was to make you commit to the year contract of paying for lessons, so they have guaranteed money and then whether you succeed is down to how hard you work, in which case I may as well be self learning.

Ultimately as well there was the fact if not enough people turned up for a whole year then the course would be cancelled.

And for some reason they decided to start it at the end of the academic year, when we have exams and people are going home. Poor timing. More evidence of a lack of planning or understanding of how to run a teach people Japanese business properly.

And for the readingly challenged the TLDR version ( did you know the FT has TLDR summaries, god how the mighty have fallen, srsly ppl r gttng s lzy )

Lol teacher gives lol class, has magicarp levels of effectiveness. Does not get my money.