Welcome to TF!

Even if the text doesn’t teach you much, still a good forum for asking questions. ^_^

Yay!

*hugs*

I have completed a level 2 Japanese college course in the US, about 10 years ago or so.

It really does depend on what book you are using.

For Japanese 1 and 2 we used Japanese for Busy People. For Japanese 3 I had a different teacher and he used Youkoso, and we were working on completely different things.

For our Japanese 2 final, it was mostly conversation based. She had only showed us a very basic number of kanji like: day, rice, person, water, mountain, etc and we weren’t really even expected to use them, but we needed to recognize them. We did of course know Hiragana and Katakana at that point, and we had a paper where we had to read a bunch of questions and answer in Japanese, and I think there was also a bit at the end where we read a little story and answered questions about it.

I do remember that the majority of our grade was based on the conversation part though.

The following are the different types of conversations we had during Japanese 1 and 2:

Basic Introduction

Day and Time

Buying something in a shop and talking about items, their positions, prices, and counting their numbers.

Talking about taking a trip

Buying a ticket for a trip

Giving directions to a taxi

Talking on a telephone

Going out to see a show

Ordering something from a restaurant

Being invited to a party

Exchanging gifts

She then started up a conversation with a random subject selected from above and you had to keep going for the alloted amount of time, probably 5-10 mins, can’t remember the exact time. She also blended the subjects together, but I kinda cheated on mine and kept steering her back to the subject I wanted to talk about. :D

I’ve recently taken the first 3 levels of Japanese at a TAFE institute (think cross between a community college and trade school) in Australia, and it covered much the same things, but she was using the same book (Japanese for Busy People, much to my surprise).

So it’s hard to say if that’s what you would be covering if they were using a different book. Might behoove you to go the college’s book store and look up what books they use for their Japanese courses and browse through the topics of each chapter.

Another idea is to use one of their bulletin boards and make a little posting offering $10 (or a case of ramen :P) to a recent Japanese student who can answer a few questions. Then they can tell you exactly what they studied and what the test was like. ^_^

If you don’t want to post something, check and see if there’s an anime club at your school. If there is, show up to one of the meetings and I can guarantee you there will be multiple people there that have taken the class. You may want to bring pepper-spray though, just in case… :P

LOL

I’m a juggler!

Uh what do you juggle?

Well small people actually.

OO!

(priceless) ^_^

Welcome to TF!

Welcome to TF! ^_^

True, but as said, he’s only on Season 3, and you have to start somewhere.

Your mind has to have a hook to hang information on in order to retain it, which is exactly why Koichi stuctured TF the way he has, and why I chose this particular learning tool. It’s the same way I teach English to foreigners.

Mnemonics aren’t the only hooks that can be used, but they are an easy one to consciously create, and thus help solidify the structure that language is built on. Those hooks become the foundation that you start with and makes sure that it is solid and strong.

Once the foundation is in place and sturdy, you can then build from there. Then it’s simply a matter of using the language on a regular basis which fuses the foundation with the whole structure, making it solid. At that point, the hooks are left behind, as they are no longer needed.

If you have to actually think about the mnemonic, then it’s a terrible mnemonic. The entire point of it is to be a trigger that automatically bridges the gap from formless data to something that the brain can recognize and thus recall easily, making it become second nature, as the brain is no longer conscious of the mnemonic. Otherwise you are left with sheer repetition, which as Koichi points out in TF, is not a very efficient means of starting to learn a language.

Once a language has been synthesized to the point of basic usage, repetition becomes a lot more efficient, as it is performed by repeated exposure to the language as a whole in its written or spoken form, as opposed to flashcards and rote responses to static prompts. At which point mnemonics for the most part falls to the wayside. Even then, most of my students would still occasionally use them for words that were uncommonly used, as they lacked the exposure to retain them sufficiently.

People who have minds that process language data more efficiently will naturally need less in the way of mnemonics, while some will have to use it extensively, as their minds simply won’t store the data otherwise. I am among the later as my mind tends to excel more in the creative department, rather than storing static data.

So of course it is better to try to get words to become second nature as soon as possible, as that is the very definition of fluency, mnemonics is simply a way of allowing that to happen, and for some, at a much quicker rate than might otherwise be achieved.