I work for a US company that's owned by a huge global company based in Japan. This year they started their first global exchange program where a few people from each company are assigned to work in a sister company for ~2 years. We currently have some people in Sweden, Italy, and Japan on assignment and are hosting foreigners from those respective countries, as well.
They are planning to continue this program into the future, and I'm on the shortlist to go to Japan about 2 years from now, with a short trip coming up for me to visit for a business conference in December.
So… I have 2 years to prepare. Which is pretty lucky, but I don't want to squander it just because it seems far off.
Japanese language ability is not an explicit requirement for this assignment, but frankly, I would rather work off of the assumption that no one will speak English to me and then be pleasantly surprised in situations where I need the help rather than the other way around. (My husband is from a bilingual country in SE Europe and so I know how it feels to be surrounded by multiple languages I don't have much of a grasp on for several months already.) It's highly likely that my company would pay for some language courses if it was confirmed I'm going and I asked.
For background, I can read hiragana and katakana already and I watch enough anime that I understand a lot of basic conversations (and yes, I'm self-aware enough to know that not everything in anime is realistic). I can read some kanji, but I would say as far as reading I still haven't achieve N5 level yet. I'm curious what level would seem realistic (and helpful enough) to aim for in 2 years. Maybe N3? I already have some books but because I never had a specific goal in mind I never got that far with serious study.
I'm a research engineer in an industrial industry, so I assume learning some industry vocabulary would be essential. I'm not entirely sure how to go about this, but I'm thinking about working through articles from our main company in Japanese and maybe asking a couple of my Japanese colleagues who work at my current company if I need a little help (one is a young engineer and the other is an older fellow whose entire job is to liaise between our companies, and so translation is explicitly part of his work). I may also be presenting a poster at the Japanese business conference in December; they usually have a translator to translate my presentation, but I think it could be a good opportunity to try and practice a speech about my project in Japanese.
Anyway, that's the situation. How do I make the most of this? I'm currently in a master's program that should end before I move over there, so this is not the only thing on my plate. But I want to make sure I prioritize it.
Right now I'm mostly focused on the language aspect, but if anyone has worked temporary assignment in Japan before and has advice on that, I would also appreciate it. Thank you for any advice on this!
by elusivebonanza