So I’ve been living in Osaka for the past 7-8 months or so and I absolutely love it. But I’m wanting to enroll in a language school because I believe my Japanese skills are not improving as fast as they could be because I’m doing self study. I believe I’ll benefit better from a structured course to follow along.
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That being said, I get lots of speaking practice in with my girlfriend (who doesn’t speak English so it forces my practice in) so I want to find a school that focuses more on reading and writing; I want to reach essentially native level fluency (I know that will definitely take a while) but want to keep reading, writing, listening, speaking, skills relatively balanced.
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My main concern is where to go. I can go pretty much anywhere in central Honshu (read as, basically anywhere between Saitama and Okayama)
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What are your experiences with language schools and what are your thoughts?
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What language schools do you recommend? I’ve done some searching already and found a few but want your opinions too.
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If we go to Tokyo then chances are we’ll be coming back to Osaka after a year or 2, and it sounds interesting but I definitely don’t want to be in Tokyo permanently.
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In my opinion, if you can, you should avoid living in Tokyo. Depending on where you live, you will spend endless hours commuting.
Another advice would be to communicate with other learners in Japanese or not at all if they don’t want it. Switching back to English in breaks is one of the worst things you can do in my opinion.
If I can you recommend you a school in general it’s JaLS Kyoto. They have another school in Sapporo that I went too and it was more than phenomenal. Looking at the reviews for the one in Kyoto leaves me with no doubt that the one in Kyoto will be on the same level.
Best of luck!
Tokyo is far more densely populated than Osaka. Also, people in Osaka are friendlier.
If you like the relaxed atmosphere of Osaka people, you should choose a school there.
Osaka is way to go.
But for reading and writing I feel it can be done by just self studying, and actually more efficient time wise.
Plenty language school have a lot of group tasks, which mean you ended up talking with fellow students who couldn’t really speak Japanese.