My Japanese is conversational at best, so I want to be as well prepared as possible. What questions can I expect?
Here is what they sent me in the email:
“About *** house,the house has available rooms but can you speak
Japanese fully ?
Because owner and manager cannot speak English so you need to make
conversation through fluent Japanese.
If it is fine for you,manager will contact you in Japanese.”
“3 You have to pass our interview（We can tell anything for our interview and you have to agree this thing”
6 comments
>My Japanese is conversational at best.
Over the years ‘conversational’ seems to have been watered down to “I can say ‘hello’, order from the McDonalds menu, and point to something in the hotbox at the conbini”.
I guess the question is, do you have _’functional Japanese’ ability?_ – the ability to handle official affairs without constant assistance, and without google translate in the palm of your hand?
We can’t tell you what questions to expect because we’re not the owner, we don’t know what their concerns are, or what vocabulary, phrasing, or other grammar the owner might use. You’ll either pass the interview or you won’t. It’s not like this is a JLPT exam or something.
They’re expecting to be able to communicate with you. In the future, if there are any problems, they will need to communicate with you about those problems and they don’t want to waste time fumbling through a dictionary or using a dodgy machine translation.
If you can communicate with them without any issue, it sounds like you will be allowed in. If you’re not fluent then it sounds like you won’t be allowed in. You should have been able to deduce this from the email when they used the word fluent.
Sounds like they don’t expect you to pass this interview. Keep looking elsewhere, this share house doesn’t sound like it can accommodate you.
This may also indicate that your potential landlord had, or is currently having trouble with tenants.
You may also want to find out what kind of untamed animals you’ll be sharing this house with before committing to anything.
You’ll almost certainly be fine. I did everything in Japanese when I was still around N5 (studied a little bit in the US before coming over). Can you understand the rules, can you understand the manager, and can the manager understand you are the questions they’re probably looking to answer.