OK SO, I had my class a few hours ago, and, it was more or less what I expected. The class is filled with.. well.. “weeaboos”! DUN DDUN DUNNNNNNNNNN

Now, while we do have a lot in common, it’s hard to take someone seriously who shows up to a college course, one pair of fake dog ears short of an inuyasha costume.. (that actually happened today) And of course, there are some people there who really want to learn and excel at the language, but the ones in the back snickering about funny sounding characters “pi, pu”, (sorry, don’t have jp keyboard installed) and talking about JPop the entire class.. well.. I hope I see less of them as the classes advance.

Anyhoo, it was of course very boring for a first class, and I’m just getting the jump by drilling some “suggested phrases” in Anki. BUT, she said no romaji (thank GOD), and actually seems like she knows what she’s doing, so this’ll be a good experience, I hope!

@Koichi Yeah I’m interested to see their approach to it, and learning to supplement everything with.. everything else lol.

@RavenTwoFive I actually got pretty lucky.. I’m 21, and though I’ve had a few semesters of college already, I just recently decided to focus my education in this direction.. and the payment and whatnot just kind of.. fell into place. (nothing I won’t have to pay back eventually, though x__x)

@Ryuuguu Azuma that’s exactly what I think. It’ll be really good to find other people with the same interests that I can get together with and talk about/study/practice with. It’s been just me up until now. And, In the first class, it’s just called “Intro to Japanese”, It looks a lot like the class i’m taking, but, i don;t think they touch kanji.. and most of the class is getting you used to the kana. And it’s most likely largely in romaji (yuck). Again, I didn’t even look at the course material until like a week ago.. and I don’t know how I’d be able to pass the class they placed me in, had I not been studying.

@Michael Yeah that would be pretty awesome. I’m interested how they teach the class at other Universities, not to mention in other countries.

@Mark Yeah that’s for one semester. I think they try to pack a lot into the course, so that does make me happy. And even if I (hopefully) know and breeze through most of it, it’ll be nice to have extra practice, and I can focus more on my online studies (textfugu, RTK)

I’ll post to this thread after I get done with my class!

This is interesting to hear from all of you!

It looks like, as i figured, experiences varied. I can definitely understand believing you speak a language better.

I’ve been in Swoosher’s French experience on about 4 dozen occasions.. hahah except i was surrounded by American folks >_>

リンディ – yeah, whenever something like that happens, i just chalk it up to not studying it enough in the first place, so ya know.. just punish myself by drilling it x20 harder the next day lol

HAH.

yeah seriously..

Thanks everyone for the answers! I can relate to all of them, and it’s a bit of a reassuring sensation.

and thanks jkl, i’m gonna get right to reading that page after posting this. i’m familiar with AJATT, and i’ve heard talk of this 10,000 sentences stuff, but wasn’t sure when that would apply to me – so thanks!

And you also make a good point, Narcoleptic. I’m aware of the need to supplement and mix methods together – but it’s all too easy to get ‘lost’ in one way for a while, so it’s good to have a reminder

I’m definitely interested to keep hearing from people

• This reply was modified 13 years, 3 months ago by  Multany.

also, i have no input on study technique yet, so i’ll leave you guys to hashing that out haha

i guess i’ll just follow anki and go from

Keyword > Kanji then lol

i have to figure out how to take that whole RTK anki set and break it up into lessons.. haven’t figured that out yet