MMoving to Japan

45yo Korean former web dev considering Language School for a job.. Is it realistic?

  • December 14, 2025

Hi everyone, hope you are doing well. 🙂

As in the subject, I'm seriously considering 6 months language course to find a dev job in Tokyo.

A little bit of about me:

– 45yo single male, have 4yr degree

– Probably my Japanese is lower than N5 but keep studying Japanese little bit everyday

– Currently working as an sell-side IT engineer for 2 years (not about an actual development), most of my day-to-day work is done in English. Currently after-tax salary is 500k~600k/month.

– This is my 9th job in my career, and actual IT career with proper employers is only about 4.5 years. I changed to IT during that time. Also I have had several career breaks and one of them was more than 2 years, which means my overall career does not look good to Japanese employers.

– Lived in one of English speaking countries for 2 years as Scala + Fullstack dev about 5 years ago. The job I'm going to look for will be mostly fullstack jobs with Java, Scala, Typescript, React, Next.js etc, with some devops. I'm currently building a web service for my client as a side job and they are ok to use it as my portfolio.

The reason I'm considering a language school is to upskill my Japanese faster. Most people advised me to study Japanese in Korea and look for a job at the same time but it feels more like a waste of time to me. I think it will easily take at least 1 year to reach the N3 level while working. Also what I heard is staying in Tokyo is much better to look for a job.

I'm hoping to find a job with almost a same level of my current salary during that 6 months period. Is my expectation realistic? What kind of jobs I can find?

Any advices or harsh comments will be welcomed!

Thanks in advance!

by peno8

1 comment

  1. If your plan is to find a job within 6 months, I don’t think it’s reasonable.

    If you are starting from zero. a few months of language school won’t get you much. Any job that would hire you with a few months of language school, probably would have hired you anyway. Remember, it takes time to find a job, so you’ll be applying right away if you want to work within 6 months. Also, changing from a student visa to a work visa takes time.

    I recommend learning Japanese in Korea. I’m assuming Korean is your native language. Unlike most languages, Korean is very very similar to Japanese. So, learning Japanese structured for Koreans would be more efficient for a native Korean speaker.

    The other plus side is that you can work while in Korea.

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