Hello everyone

SO, It’s been quite a while since I’ve been around Text/Tofugu, and I thought I’d share my thoughts and opinions on my past year (or 2 semesters/ 9 months… give or take, really) of “university” level basic Japanese classes.

—————–SPOILER: this is just one big rant————————

To start with, I will say right now that I feel taking Japanese courses in a class setting has been a waste of time and money.

Granted, I have to take these classes as a mandatory language for my Major, and  in retrospect, maybe my professor wasn’t as well fitted for the task as others might be.

Basically, we were working out of the なかま textbook for both semesters (101/102). For those unfamiliar with this book, it has a weird way of introducing information, and various conjugation is spread awkwardly throughout the text, making it hard to refer back to the information – or even having trouble finding where they’ve placed it in the book.

Anyways, that aside, I felt the pacing was far too slow, and the homework and exercises too tedious and way too often. I was hardly ever able to sit down and focus on anything  outside of the course material due to being assigned almost 15-20 pages of homework per class and then the rest of my free time being spent studying words and nouns/verbs that didn’t seem terribly relevant (as far as the apparent usefulness of them at the time)

The second issue with this class was the professor. I had the same lady for both 101/102 semesters, and I feel like she really wasn’t on the ball. Think of how Peggy Hill teaches Spanish on King of the Hill, and then just bump up her knowledge a little bit for realism-sake. She was definitely competent, and obviously knew more than her students, but (and I don’t want to be too nitpick-y, beause Japanese teachers in Arizona aren’t exactly plentiful) she was an American lady who has never spent more than a few months in Japan at a time. Her pronunciation sounded pretty off (though I’m no authority), and she needed to take a break in the middle of class to look up teaching material  – more times than I can remember.

Ah, also, we only met two days a week, for about 2.5 hours each day, so it wasn’t enough to feel like I was getting the class time in that I felt might be more appropriate – and that’s where the 15-20+ pages of homework each class came from. Normally, I would agree that the more homework – the better, but it was so much that by the time I was done churning out 10+ pages of tedious homework, and then studying a 50 word vocabulary list for a test the next week, I had hardly enough energy or spare time to study anything else.

I received an A+ in both classes, which I do believe I’ve earned, but when there’s no free time to let all of the information of each chapter set in, the worst possible thing happens:

The inability to successfully retain information.

Each chapter was treated the way you would treat any other textbook in any other class.

Learn information > study > regurgitate information for an A on a test > forget information > repeat.

Chapter after chapter.

Where hardly any chapter incorporates the information or vocabulary from the ones before it, leaving you to only have to worry about the current chapter at hand.

Oh yes, I should note that while the option of making friends and having Japanese study partners was thoroughly explored, It turns out that most of the other students  in the class were either just scraping by, or were unavailable to study with enough frequency, so that was a dead-end option soon enough.
Which brings me to today.  I have my first class of JPN 201 in about 2 weeks and much of the basic information, like adjective conjugation, plain forms/plain speech/plain conjugation , and 　て　forms have gotten embarrassingly rusty, and when I decided to start recapping all of this information I knew well enough at one time, the textbook was almost NO help. The book is almost set up to make it impossible (for me, at least) to gather up the things I need to know, and find a way to convert it into digestible information, meaning the different forms of conjugation are only hinted at in some chapter/lesson titles.

My one shining ray of hope came in the form of my first Japanese learning love: Textfugu.

I can’t stress enough how happy I was to come back and get a good refresher course on all of the parts I had trouble finding in that stuffy textbook.

So anyways, hopefully the worst is over. I have a native Japanese man for a professor next semester, and as nervous as that makes me, because we’re supposed to have a pretty good hold on the basics of the language (and thankfully, because of Textfugu, I will be all refreshed when that day comes), I think it can only get better………… to a degree.

In conclusion: I had a lot of concerns about what college courses were going to be like, and unfortunately – all of my greatest fears were more or less confirmed. I know that my experience is most likely uncommon (as far as the quality of teaching goes), but now I know what to expect, I suppose.

I would take learning from Koichi and Textfugu 9 times out of 10, if the other option was to learn in a university setting.

Anyways, If anyone read all of this, and made it through a rant as poorly organized as the textbook I was complaining about, I’ll answer questions if anyone happens to have any.

-Thanks

• This topic was modified 12 years, 4 months ago by  Multany.