Hello. I don't want to get too in the weeds about my situation since it isn't that important but the summary is that I am around N4 after starting Genki 1+2 early this year and completing it last month, I am just now beginning Quartet. I just returned home from 15 days in Japan for an event. I am in a great situation financially and am in the privileged position of having the ability to be able to take up to a few years off with current spending without cutting into my main investments. I am being laid off from my job but getting severance for several months at the end of the year… So, I am in a unique situation in my life where I'm at a bit of a crossroads about what I want to do next and while in Japan I started to toy with the idea of doing an immersion learning experience. I also felt while in Japan that I had a decent grammar, vocab, and kanji basis but struggled greatly to understand spoken language or to create sentences in a timely way, so I felt a holistic approach may be a gamechanger for me.
I have many questions about this, I have only done a little bit of research and am primarily interested in just hearing about people's experiences with doing it.
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How effective would you say it is? Is it truly so much better than learning on your own in your home-country? Roughly from what starting level of fluency to what finishing level of fluency would you say you achieved? (either in terms of JLPT levels or otherwise)
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How long was your program / how long do you recommend? Were you able to do it in multiple times (ie could you do 3 months, and then 3 months later in the year, etc)?
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Do you have any particular programs you recommend? (I am 31 years old and am open to different lengths of programs but 3-6 months is probably ideal).
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How much did your program cost between tuition, rent, and other costs?
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How much time in a day did your program take? Were you able to do part-time work, and if so do you recommend doing so? Is it better to be the typical "English teacher" role or something more potentially Language-immersive like working at a store?
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How did you feel about things you had to leave behind? Perhaps most people would be younger than me, but did you have to leave behind family, friends, pets, hobbies, relationships, etc?
Thanks a lot!
by 7thPwnist
4 comments
I went as part of my college program so a lot of your questions don’t apply but I’d studied 3 years. It was a huge boon to me being in-country as far as speed of improvement. But I think maybe if I’d gone sooner I wouldn’t have been able to get as much out of it.
I’d think hard about it at your age because even if you get really good at Japanese it’s not going to help your work prospects much unless you want to live in Japan. Nobody in the U.S. cares. So it’s basically like a sabbatical for you probably.
My friend went to one for a year in Tokyo, cost something like 15,000 dollars AUD. He was in a lower level class and said around 80% of his classmates were Chinese. He ended up going from zero to passing N3 although I’m not sure how high his score was or if he just barely passed.
I lived in Japan for nearly 4 years, didn’t study 90% of the time. Came back to home country to start 2nd undergrad degree and minoring Japanese. Recently just did the N4 test and It wasn’t hard, probably didn’t ace it but definitely passing easily. I think a couple years in Japan even if you don’t study you will pick up a lot of stuff through just immersion. It’s about similar levels to uni students in 2nd year of Japanese imo.
I went in 2020, did it for a year and a half, then got sick of it and got a job in Japan in 2022.
I went in at 0. Do I recommend language school? Kind of not really yeah. The school was okay, but the classes were often paced at the lowest common denominator. Meaning if you have a class disrupter it’s annoying and kind of a waste. Some teachers were fantastic and some were awful. The real benefit to language school for me was taking time off my career to just dedicate to learning the language and being in a learning environment. Most students were very motivated, and those students were great. Some not so much. In the end, 70% of my learning was just me myself grinding.
I recommend looking for schools where the ratio of asian to non asian is even or, if you are a westerner, favored to asian. You’ll be forced to use Japanese to talk and hang out with them.
I thought Japanese language schools were great for keeping me on the fast track for studying. I don’t think they are perfect for “immersion”.
Many are designed to get Chinese and Korean students into Japanese university or trade schools. So the goal is getting to N2 level (plus similar skills in writing and speaking) within two years. This is a pretty fast pace and drop out rates are high.
You won’t get the opportunity to say many sentences in a classroom because there are a lot of students. And won’t have tons of time outside of class because you will be studying for all the tests.
Some schools have niches. I think Meguro Learning Center had a lot of American students (they didn’t offer visa support). Nichibei focused a bit more on speaking. Some universities have special programs for a different audience.