Comments | chard: Something must change

chard

Something must change

Sep 16, 2005 15:53

After my short summer holiday my Japanese had improved enormously. It's taken all of two weeks for the school to reduce my capabilities back to the point where I'm as frustrated as I've ever been.

On Wednesday we had a seminar at which some folks were invited from previous years to give us advice. One of them told us that we should not do any ( Read more... )

Comments 5

ashley_y September 16 2005, 07:01:57 UTC

I'm sorry to hear about your frustration. Do you have other options for learning Japanese?

chard September 16 2005, 08:01:12 UTC

Not on this programme. Leaving the programme is possible, but would cost me a great deal of money, and I'd have to go home. It's pretty unlikely that I'd be given another opportunity to study Japanese while being paid for it, as I am now. My options remain pretty much as described earlier.

p4user September 16 2005, 13:03:22 UTC

In a nutshell this sounds like they are giving you training whereas what you want is education. I sympathise.
If you can endure it, I suppose the question is whether doing so enables you to meet goals that you desire and can't meet in another way.

I strongly sympathise with your not wanting to say things you don't understand. I'd resent that too. As a child I hated singing lessons because I didn't agree with the words we were supposed to sing.

Pimsleur anonymous September 22 2005, 13:54:00 UTC

Have you considered something like Pimsleur? I'm using it for Russian and I'm very impressed so far - I'm on lesson 23 out of about 90. It's all spoken, and comprehension is built up slowly using useful, everyday phrases.

...Jane (Ex-Symbian - we met there briefly)

reyet September 22 2005, 21:44:57 UTC

It sounds awful. At first I thought they were giving you tons of simplistic drills and no conversation practice. But it's worse than that: you say the drills don't make sense either. So are the drills in fact ludicrously elaborate? Or do they not spend long enough on each new thing for you to be able to get the hang of it?

This might not help you, but could help others: do the EU people realise how terrible the school is?

Meanwhile, here in Cambridge the 2-hours-a-week Japanese class I was going to has stopped owing to lack of demand. :(