I took Japanese classes in primary school, highschool and did my major in Japanese at university. Would I recommend them? No. Of course the very existence of this website and blog are for promoting my Japanese tutoring services (you can check out my fantastic YouTube videos as well!) so of course I will be biased, but let me make my case.
The cliff notes on why are:
- bad value for money
- classroom environments are required pragmatically to keep the class around the level of the weakest student; and
- general ignorance of successful Japanese teaching strategies
Value for money
Japanese classes tend to be very bad value for money. How many hours per week of classroom instruction will you get for thousands of dollars? You can get much more Japanese immersion for free through YouTube, audiobooks, Japanese SO…
Nobody will care that you have a degree in Japanese. If your job requires you to speak or use Japanese, at some point you’re going to have to prove you can do that. Showing someone a piece of paper that says you completed a Japanese program will not help.
I learnt more in my 10 months exchange living in Japan than all the hours I spent in Japanese classes.
You won’t have a monopoly on the teacher’s time and as discussed below, your teacher is not necessarily going to be any good at teaching. I’ve met many people who’ve learnt to speak Japanese, and almost none of them got competent by attending classes.
The classroom issue and pragmatism
Classes progress at a snail’s pace. The learning has to be done by you, having a teacher read out kanji or vocab or going through grammar to you every day will never result in you actually learning it. So if students haven’t done the homework or got across all the material yet, classroom discussions are moot. The divide in language classes will be stark, as you will generally end up with people who are bilingual/went on exchange for a significant period and then everyone else. As the years progress and the class size gets smaller and smaller, the class discussion will be dominated by the people who can speak and understand on the fly, and the rest sitting there completely out of the loop and not contributing.
Kanji, one of the most important aspects of Japanese, is virtually never taught in a classroom environment. You might get a list of kanji that will be on the exam and if you’re lucky you will be left to your own devices you can work through it. If you’re unlucky, the instructor will make you do rote memorisation (ie writing each one out 100 times and hoping you remember it because that’s how Japanese people do it) which does not work.
Pragmatism is a big issue with Japanese learning due to the structure of the language. You have polite and casual forms in Japanese. Unfortunately, the polite forms are conjugations on the casual form. However for pragmatic reasons, that is because teachers/schools/educational experts prefer that students speak politely, the polite form is taught first. This causes a lot of confusion for learners of Japanese and I have to spend a few hours going through it whenever I get a new student. If I know they’re in school, the very first thing I will do is ask some basic questions to see if they get this point. Generally it will go like this:
Say “I will go to the park”
こうえんにいきます
Now say the same sentence, but casually.
こうえんにいく
And generally by that point, I’ve got enough information about their level to start teaching effectively. Spoilers, I have to start from the beginning of Tae Kim’s guide or Imabi.
General ignorance of successful teaching strategies
This is not particularly a problem with Japanese classes but with any type of learning.
First of all you have a selection bias with regards to anyone who makes it to a teaching position. There will be a large cohort of people who make it to become teachers, particularly where barriers to entry are higher (eg tertiary sector) or because of opportunity cost evaluations they make (“I’m already making good money in sales, can’t be bothered to get my teaching degree”), who just ‘get’ the material. It is hard to say exactly what ‘getting it’ is, but it could be biological reasons such as IQ or environmental reasons. The point is not exactly what it is, but because of human diversity there will be people who will do well in certain areas and others who will not.
However just because you make it to become a teacher, this does not mean you are going to be a good teacher. In fact, as many of the parts may have come easy to you, you will find it very difficult to ever convey this to your students.
Unless you luck out and get a good teacher who has examined the established teaching methods and rebuilt a curriculum on their own that will actually make you proficient, it’s not worth it. I always teach to a syllabus etc when I have school students but at the same time I’m using that as a list to make sure they know what’s on the exam, because in the end they are getting marked via exams and so I make sure that they get the highest mark possible. The rest of the 75% of the time I am trying to actually teach Japanese to them so that they understand why those items are on the syllabus.
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