part of a much longer survey i took from murasakineko42

[halcyon]

Comments

[tabular_rasa]

I love the language and I enjoyed learning it, I did not enjoy the way they chose to teach it. It was very much a learn your lines and then perform sort of thing, I don't have the memory for that sort of thing.
You didn't happen to use "Japanese: The Spoken Language" textbook/CDs, did you? That was the way my university courses were conducted as well-- memorization and regurgitation of dialogues as a performance in class basically. It's known as the audio-lingual method, and while some utterance-drilling (especially when demonstrating/practicing slight variations on a theme) can be useful to a point, memorization and rote response is not considered the best way to learn a language overall.

[halcyon]

It might've been. I bought the textbooks so I still have them around here somewhere, but I remember it was an old text book that involved a lot of boring babbling about office work, typewriters, and shopping for furoshiki and ballpoint pens. I didn't find it a very good way to learn a language. I've always had trouble learning a new language as it is, all the Spanish I learned in high school flew out of my brain the minute I started learning Japanese and I didn't find memorizing phrases and repeating them back with little changes very meaningful.

[tabular_rasa]

It could have been the same book (I do remember one conversation about a furoshiki, in which we all deeply enjoyed putting the histrionic emphasis as on the CD on fuROshiki??), though I think most Japanese textbooks even in use today were originally published when you studied Japanese because you were going to work over there in their crazy awesome '80s economy and thus clearly what you needed to know most were routine work conversations. I remember at least one that mentioned a wapuro, aka word processor, which I've literally only touched one of in my entire life. DATED