I made a chart on how I plan to move to Japan. What do you guys think?

5 comments

1. I have looked at your chart and I can say that going to language school after a Japanese university is a bad idea, because it will ruin your resume. And your life will be miserable if you attend a Japanese university with N4.

   The preferable scenario will be: learn Japanese in your home country (up to N2ish, so you can hold a spontaneous simple conversation with Japanese at least for 5 minutes) -> Enroll Japanese university(preferably a prestigious national university, because national is cheaper than private and there are different quotas for international students. so it should not be impossible to get in even into a prestigious one) -> Shuukatsu -> Work and live in Japan.

2. N1 is relatively difficult to pass but N2 is doable with several years of diligent self-study (and about $400 worth of books + ChatGPT etc).

   Japanese gets a rep as [the hardest language to learn](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/txc8er/foreign_service_institute_language_difficulty/) but that’s for diplomatic service which requires very high standards, but for basic working-in-Japan purposes N2 is good enough.

   Japanese has thousands of loan words from English, the basic phonetic structure is about as simple as Spanish (with several notable subtleties like the soft ga, tricky ryu/ru intonation in a lot of words, so to get to a non-accented native level is indeed tricky).

   I took 2 years of college Japanese but what really unlocked the language for me when I was living in Japan was just knocking out the ~2,500 kanji used in daily life. Once I knew the basic meaning of each kanji I was equipped to begin sussing out what the words I was seeing all around me meant, like the 歯医者 sign on the pole means ‘tooth’ + ‘doctor’ + ‘person/one-who-does-something’ = ‘dentist’.

   With the technology surge we’re seeing now I think living in Japan will be a lot easier later this decade so I think you’re on the right track here; get that 4-year degree the immigration office wants to see and start studying Japanese. It’s certainly easier to do the latter now than when I started in the late 80s : )

3. First off edit your post to note that you mean uni in your home country.

   Second, you should already be learning Japanese as much as possible right now. Don’t wait, literally go online and get a study plan now and start tomorrow.

   Third, do Japanese language school first if you can afford it. Get it out of the way to see if you want to live in Japan instead of spending 4 years thinking about it at uni then finally going and not liking it. You can also get a base of Japanese ability and start early learning a better accent and more casual/colloquial Japanese, and also learn Japanese exclusively without having to juggle as much with other classes. Getting early immersion and more concentrated study for half a year or a year will be much more useful than multiple years of less intensive study, and then once you have a level of ability and learned the basics it’s far easier to improve via consuming Japanese media and literature and increase vocab etc naturally.

   You also want to have the ability to have the option of 1) considering going to a Japanese uni if you really want to stay, or 2) even if you go to uni in your home country being able to do shuukatsu during uni via career forums etc. and already having a good level of Japanese. At worst you fail at shuukatsu and need to get some experience before doing a mid career search, but graduating university with no job and insufficient language ability puts you in a very poor position. Earlier Japanese ability also opens the door for internships and networking early, or maximizing the effectiveness of a study abroad year during uni.

4. This chart is cool, but I think the advice you’re getting is all about Japanese language ability.

   Specifically for network jobs, you don’t need to speak a single word of Japanese in decent positions. I would definitely recommend focusing on your IT / network skills more than Japanese language.

   Living in Japan as a broke student or at a Japanese company is kinda fun and interesting.

   Living in Japan with high disposable income from a technical job working English is 1000x better, and your skills are more transferable to other countries.

5. Do you speak any Japanese at this point? I believe to enroll in language school, they want you to have at least JLPT N5. The more Japanese you already speak, the more you’re going to get out of your language school experience, so start studying now.