I’m thinking of quitting my Japanese class

19 comments

1. One advantage of a teacher correcting you is that your foundation gets firmed up. It is easy to make mistakes if nobody is there to correct them. I think this is a big challenge where Japanese grammar and vocabulary are so different from those of English.

   The language classes in a Japanese language school similarly are fully in Japanese, full speed ahead, with sloppy penmanship, and high stress. Although Genki is generally not used in Japan.

   I also need to look up several resources for each grammar and many vocabulary to fully understand. No one resource is good enough IMHO.

   The stressful situation is suboptimal. For the remaining classes, you might try fully learning & memorising all the material several days (weeks) before class. This changes the class into a “final review” for you.

   Good luck!

2. Hm, I was in a similar situation last year – I’ve ended up taking Japanese 2, 3, and 4 in college for P/F rather than for grades, but I think sticking with Japanese class has really helped me out in the end, since I’ll be working in Japan in a few months. I was probably the bottom of my class because I didn’t have enough time to study outside of class so my grammar fluency is quite low, but I can convey opinions and discuss complicated topics fairly well.

   Like you said, immersion is a super key part, and although your teacher might be seemingly judging based on correctness, it’s actually pretty important because bad grammatical habits can be long-term and hard to correct later on! The thing about corrections is that you do have to be super open to them and constantly reviewing your mistakes – which is super hard since that requires work outside of the classroom.

   However, you do bring a good point that sometimes self-study is better – it really depends on what you want to do with your Japanese. If you plan on being a specialist and use it in only certain scenarios, I think it makes sense to just drop the class and self-study. But the benefit of Genki and some other textbooks is that they try to cover a variety of topics and grammatical points, which is definitely helpful in generally speaking and understanding the language. Being in a class allows for practice of those grammatical points that you might otherwise forget about, and more importantly, improvisational conversation practice to make grammar more familiar to you.

   Hopefully this advice helps, and hopefully other people have ideas as well!

3. There’s no shame in quitting the class if it just isn’t right for you. I quit a Japanese class and continued self-study and found that as a much better fit for myself. The class I was in wasn’t very structured and was way ahead of the level I was currently at, so it felt like a waste of my time to be there. I think it’s up to you to decide how your study time is best spent. Good luck!

4. What level of education are you in?

   Sounds like she maybe a native Japanese teacher.

   In a high school, you might already have satisfied your requirements for FL. Get out of there.

   In university of it’s your major it might be more tricky.

5. OP it sounds like you’ll benefit from the class environment as others have said especially getting the opportunity to speak with a native, however it also sounds like you should drop this one and find another one as this one doesn’t sound great especially if you’re not getting much out of it.

6. Honestly, that doesn’t sound like a good learning environment to me at all. It is worth noting that sometimes the thing that feels ineffective and hard is actually effective in the end. What I mean by that is that you may feel like you are learning better on your own, but then if you measure your results you see that you’re learning at a slower rate than if you were learning with the teacher.

   Personally, I think getting a tutor for one-on-one tutor sessions something like once a week would be more effective for me than that environment, assuming the tutor is good at what they do. I have a language teacher on italki that teaches Japanese in Japan, and she is amazingly kind, very concise, and incredibly good at what she does. She’s also familiar with pretty much all of the different language learning books and material because it is her job in Japan in a language school. That said, it took me three tutors before I found her on italki and the others were varying in quality. Her classes make me want to pay her more than I have to pay her. Lol I feel like I am a slow learner at certain Japanese subjects and that I would get left behind in a class environment on those subjects. This way I can go at a pace that is reasonable for me. The downside there though is that getting left behind is a good motivator for giving more time to something. 😅

   That may have been all over the place, but I hope what I said helps your decision a bit.

7. I’m of the opinion that as a beginner you should never pay for Japanese lessons as at the beginning stages everything you could ever want is freely available to you, providing you’re willing in to put in the effort and motivate yourself.

8. If you’re not enjoying the experience at all and learning the language is not a super important thing you absolutely need to accomplish to survive, get out of there now. A shitty experience can potentially destroy your motivation and pleasure to study the topic with other teachers or by yourself.
   There are endless examples you’ll find all around you, from people who hate math just because they didn’t like their teacher style, to people ending up hating their hobbies because the classes they decided to take to deepen their knowledge were stressful. Even if what she’s doing happened to be the optimal way to reach fluency, everyone has their own pace and style. If she doesn’t match yours so much that you feel stressed, either try to study the coming chapters in advance, change teacher or try self-studying. Lots of people did it successfully and you already have a solid foundation to not give up easily.

9. I’ve watched some of Andy’s content and while he explains most concepts in an easy way, I honestly don’t recommend it. He makes mistakes (i.e. saying stuff that sounds unnatural) and his accent is… not good. You may learn stuff if you’re a beginner, but I recommend having quality input over convenience.

10. Why not do both? Being in a Japanese class does not prohibit you from learning on your own.

    Since you are probably not learning out of necessity, you should do what makes you feel best.

    With that being said:
    Tbh. your points feel not really valid. I don’t know your teacher and she may be incompetent, but for the most part what you have said is just how it is.
    – Teacher focusing on correctness is a good things to prevent you from forming wrong habits. In the begging it might seem harsh, but if you let that stuff slide early it will come back to haunt you bad.
    – Stringing the right words together with the wrong conjugation is still a wrong sentence. Making a complex sentence that is still wrong makes no sense. Learn to walk before you learn to run.
    – Bad handwriting is pretty subjective to the reader. In most cases it is a lack of reading experience. And trust me, handwritings always get worse.
    – If you could explain things better than your teacher, you would not be making the mistakes she corrects. Teaching is harder than you think. A native is also not a good teacher by default.
    – A good teacher will try to give you a decent basis to work with. This might differ in vocabulary and grammar to what you are personally interested in, but it is no 1 on 1 session right?
    – My impression is that your learning until now is pretty unbalanced. You learned a lot of words (online/on your own), but you don’t have the grammar/speaking/reading skills to back that up. Learning words is not everything.

    You need to take a look in the mirror and call yourself out. You are trying slang, short form etc in a class that is supposed to teach you fundamentals. But your fundamentals are wrong. Just getting the point across is not relevant in a language class. Teacher is actually not interested in what you did over the weekend. It’s about teaching you correct patterns.

11. Self studying can be very beneficial. I’ve been a self study for almost a year now and still going strong. Though, self motivation and practice can be really difficult without someone holding you to it like a sensei does. Quitting classes to self study is very intimidating, but at the same time it’s very possible to do and may be more beneficial depending on what you want to do with your studies. Personally I’ve found that study groups/communities are incredibly helpful as a self study, maybe you can branch out to some classmates and form a group. Whatever you do though, keep a goal in mind to keep you going and don’t be afraid to branch out from what you’re doing now, there’s many fun and interesting ways to study like lyric translations, journaling, reading stories, etc.

12. Please DM me and let me send you all of our books free of charge. It seems you might already be beyond our materials but maybe a different perspective would help.

13. I know that if I was producing sentences with “relative accuracy”, and my teacher _wasn’t_ correcting me, I’d be pretty pissed. Having someone highlighting your mistakes can be annoying, but it’s worth far more in the long run. It’s how you get good fast.

14. language learning classes just suck for actually learning languages in general

15. It really depends on your goals. If you are just learning it to learn it, then the stress isn’t worth it. You can find other ways. Sure the immersion is important, and can be very helpful, but honestly you can find it elsewhere. I live in the US in a state that has a very small Japanese community which is hours away. I don’t have time for that. I joined a site called Take Lessons and met my Japanese teacher. After one lesson, we decided to deal directly with each other, and I ditched Take Lessons lol. Much cheaper! I have been taking lesson with her for 3 years. We do Zoom lessons and it is much easier than having to track down native Japanese just to talk. I am sure you could do the same thing. I am pretty good at the book work, but when I comes to speaking, I trip up a lot because I don’t have many opportunities to speak it. And we all know that textbook Japanese isn’t spoken Japanese.

    Sort out your goals, and decide if all the stress and frustration is really worth it. Trust me, there are plenty of resources out there.

16. >her handwriting is so bad

    Talk to your school about the issue

    >Also, she focuses more on correctness than clarity

    Yes that’s a teacher’s job.

    >with relative accuracy.

    which you’re trying to grow out of to go to the next step.

    >I just feel like the class is both nerve-wracking

    It’s a class.

    >constant corrections

    That’s what you go to school for.

    >I mean, corrections are helpful but I feel like they can be detrimental to when I’m trying to get a point across

    Do you want to find out in real life how much misunderstanding that can cause at work, among friends and between spouses?

    From what you shared, it seems to be a good class to stay in.

17. I do mainly self study but also have a tutor. My tutor is all in one. I learn from her, I speak to her, and she corrects me – instantly. Like others have said, self study can be your ultimate primer and your tutor can be a good review.

    I have zoomed through many lessons my tutor has provided me. It lets me know I’m on the right track. If I’m screwing up on a particular area, she recognizes that and we focus on it

18. If you think getting corrected by a native speaker in a beginner Japanese class is rough, wait until you experience real life. Beginner Japanese classes with native speakers are always a catch up game for your brain and it’s not easy. You’re getting corrected on short form and slang because it’s way above your level and won’t get your point across better. Remember language is culture and she’s helping you not be a bumbling idiot.

    It sounds like you’re chickening out because it’s difficult. That’s about 80% of beginner learners in Japanese classes. Do you want to be that guy?

19. >> have trouble distinguishing between た and り among other script

    This is an interesting statement. Because standard college courses use textbook/slides/websites often with the same single font type, students will be never able to learn what kind of widely acceptable handwriting variations exist, and maybe even never seen any Japanese people writing Japanese letters. We don’t write Japanese characters (hiragana etc) exactly like what the digital texts show. For example, people do not write り with one stroke like that.