Anyone going to york st john for any of the chinese courses

Okay, I was also thinking of the Japanese course. How many hours of the language do you have a week and would you say the language is taught to a high level? Also what sort of resources do you use to study the language, like film, books etc?

the language aspect of the course will be the same on all language courses, we have 3 hours a week, conversation/grammar 2 hours and writing and reading class 1 hour. I know it seems like nothing but you really can't be taught language, there is a huge emphasis on self study and if you expect outside help you will never advance to a higher level like most of the students actually, you can go to class with a bunch of questions. Japanese is 3 years. You don't want to start at beginner level at ysj, so you should know all of kana confidently and know basic grammar and vocabulary, 2nd year is the year you spend in Japan and a lot of people on this course are pretty bad because they don't really care about learning japanese, it's funny

we use Genki I and II, which I hate but most unis use this but I never actually had to look at it other than for the weekly kanji tests, but depends how good you are. I'm at Sophia uni now and I'm halfway through n3 (conversational), next semester I will be halfway through n2 and by the time I graduate I could take the jlpt and pass n2 as long as I keep practicing, chasing n1 (native level) is something I'll think about when I pass n2 (near native)

personally, I liked Japanese from zero but the books we use at Sophia are excellent (situational functional japanese) buying along with Basic Kanji Book 1 would be a great start, duolingo for japanese is pretty good now so you should test it, I can watch tv shows and understand but not everything obviously, at the beginner level I used to avoid watching anime because they use strange grammar and vocab, terrace house is the most natural to watch or live action dramas are fine. You should practice reading on NHK easy or some twitter accounts, when you get to start n3 you can read manga with furigana.

The absolute best way to study, is a whiteboard and flash cards on quizlet which can turn into vocabulary/kanji tests. I use the whiteboard to write things repeatedly without getting bored like I would on paper, the same can apply to Korean since I took a Korean module at ysj too, Korean is the easier language since japanese has 'tones' (pitch accent) and if you don't learn it you will always have a bad pronunciation and hard to understand (I have to learn it so I don't lose marks at Sophia but this doesn't apply to ysj), the kanji system is just a nightmare too, Chinese is fairly easy language, once you learn tones it's just practice and the grammar structure is like English, the writing system is easy since there's only one or two readings for one hanzi but japanese can have like 7 for one kanji but you get used to the feel of it when you get better 開く　開く　Aku and hiraku look the same but are read differently so depends what you'd rather pull your hair out for

best advice is choose the language you want to do most, if you end up wanting to go to Japan after finishing a degree with Chinese you can with the TESOL certificate and 2:1 probably

What was your Japanese level before you started at York St. John?