Anyone Else Starting the Japanese Studies Course in September 2011?

I got my 'Welcome to Sheffield you mature old hag' pack today but it wasn't the one I was looking forward to, boo.

I may be able to change course to Japanese Studies with Spanish after speaking with admissions in the SOMLAL department but he is unsure whether it's a good idea to undertake learning 2 languages from scratch, what does everyone else think? I really want to do 2 languages and I self-taught myself to IGCSE A grade Japanese within 2 months, so it's not completely from scratch, but then again I have forgotten a lot of it.

Surely it is possible, I mean, people do Modern Language degrees and learn 3 at once sometimes, right? Though, I guess that's German/French included and they require A Level for that.

I reaaally wanna do it though. I know it would be a ton of work but I'm definitely up to the challenge.

Personally, I think it would be quite hard and that you'd need a lot of motivation. You'd also never be able to fully focus your efforts on one language - meaning you wouldn't be as good at the end of the degree compared to if you'd just done one. It's a trade off though, because you'd have two languages.

Did you do a language A-Level? I know that a lot of people who did Japanese having never done a language before found it a struggle to get their heads around basic grammatical concepts like tenses, and different word order.

You'll miss out on all the Japanese non-language modules in 1st year - which would also be a shame.

Really it just depends if you are good at languages or not - which only you can answer. If you've never done a romance language before or have no idea of your language ability, then I think it is kind of suicidal. Because you could very easily find that both Spanish and Japanese are a massive struggle and you'd end up drowning in vocab lists and grammar sheets. Or they could both go amazingly well and you could find them both a piece of cake, and be loving it. The people I know who do Japanese with Spanish do all love the Spanish side of their degree, but they all did it at A-Level and have lived in a Spanish country, so I don't know anyone you could ask who did both from scratch.

Perhaps doing modules at the Modern Languages Teaching Centre would be less suicidal? :V

Thanks for your reply!

No I didn't do an A level language as I did an Access course - I left school when I was 12, so

When I was in the process of leaving school however, I still had to do mock SATs despite the fact I didn't have any lessons for 3 months and I still managed to get the highest score in French out of the class, plus I love language learning in general and find it the most fun method of learning. I don't know whether the class just hated French or not, but I found it easy enough to retain.

Japanese wouldn't be completely from scratch, I have forgotten a lot of it but I have been familiar with the language for around 8 years and am used to the characters, grammar and intonation etc., so I don't think I could get them mixed up as they're not similar like... Italian and Spanish, for example.

I'd just love to be trilingual, I think I could do it but of course it's all conjecture as I have no idea how I'd actually do until I.. well, do it.

I self-taught myself to IGCSE A grade Japanese within 2 months, so it's not completely from scratch

I don't like you > : (

I took French for A level and got an A* so languages aren't particularly new to me. I used to hate them though, and got low B's and C's in French, but then I tried revising GCSE French by simply changing the language settings in my video games, looking up any words or tenses I didn't understand, and it worked extremely well. I rapidly improved and shocked my teachers by getting an A* at GCSE when my teacher had me down as useless.

I'm hoping that once I'm at a stage where I can read Japanese competently, I'll improve at a similar rate. I'm not completely sure why I'm writing this, but I'd be interested to hear about other people's experiences with languages.

Spanish is * difficulty and Japanese is ***** difficulty

Get that out of your head. :V

Spanish is * difficulty
Japanese is also * difficulty

If you think Japanese is hard, it will be hard.

In the end, it's all down to your individual effort. Everything from grammar to kanji comes down to effort. None of it is five-star difficult; otherwise there wouldn't be over 150,000,000 people who speak it.

That website should be saying "Spanish is * effort and Japanese is ***** effort"

People are going to neg me now because they became fluent in Spamish in one month but couldn't do the same in Japanese. The reason is simply that there is so much more to learn in order to master Japanese. That, and perhaps the fact Japanese is not a Neo-Latin language so it feels "weird" to our western brains. But it's not due to difficulty. :x

I'd just like to be as prepared as possible for the start of term.

So how did you get up to A grade IGCSE so fast? Did you take classes or did you just self study? What kind of materials did you use? Sorry for the barrage of questions, I'd just like to be as prepared as possible for the start of term.

Get that out of your head. :V

Spanish is * difficulty
Japanese is also * difficulty

That website should be saying "Spanish is * effort and Japanese is ***** effort"

Really that means the same thing, difficulty is defined as 'requiring a lot of effort to accomplish' therefore how difficult a language is is determined by how much time or effort it requires to master

"Of the 63 languages analyzed, the five most difficult languages to reach proficiency in speaking and proficiency in reading (for native English speakers who already know other languages), requiring 88 weeks,[clarification needed] are Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean. The Foreign Service Institute notes that Japanese is typically more difficult to learn than other languages in this group."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difficulty_of_learning_languages#English_as_the_first_language)

But ultimately, you are right in saying it will just require more effort than Spanish.

Hi btw i think ur blog's japanese is rly good, even tho ive only done a-level i still understand most of it, im so motivated now to give japanese my all come september!!

So do u think i could do korean from scratch since i already did japanese at a-level and i heard they have similar grammatical structures.