Going to school in your 30’s

Hello everyone, I’m a 32(f) I’m currently working as a surgical tech, and I decided to take some college courses to learn Japanese. I start in June Mon-Thur for 2 hours. Is there any advice you can give me? I’m a beginner and only speak English, Spanish, and ASL. I want to take this course to be able to speak with some of patients who don’t speak English.

9 comments
  1. If you live in a community with Japanese people .It could prove useful but if not . Nothing really.

  2. My advice would be to listen to podcasts and watch youtube, a lot of it. 8 hours a week of study and your progress will be really slow and impractical; the more exposure u get to comprehensible language the faster you’ll improve

  3. Find out which textbook you’ll be using and start learning the vocabulary with flashcards ahead of time (Anki is great for this)

    Other than that, enjoy your class!

  4. Japanese is intense and difficult and you sound like you have a really high-stress job so I wanna say, please don’t overdo it!!!

    Thank you for helping at the hospital!

  5. * learn the 2 syllabaries. this is fundamental

    * watch out how you address people. you can’t just refer to everyone with a 2nd person pronoun (e.g. anata) in all cases like in English with ‘you’. don’t worry, teachers will explain this (subject often gets dropped, people often use titles like sensei, etc.), but just telling you beforehand, especially since you work a customer-facing job

    * a lot of people and teachers will hate me for this, but I prefer learning the plain (dictionary) form of verbs first instead of the polite language form (which is conjugated). this helps one avoid problems with relative clauses later down the line (e.g. watashi ga kaita hon, instead of watashi ga kakimashita(*wrong*) hon for “the book I wrote”)

    * verbs are split in 3 categories (ichidan, godan, irregular verbs (suru and kuru))

    Since picking up the rest of the written portion of the language is a long, time-consuming process, and often misunderstood, it usually gets put off and taught at a glacial pace. You may wish to save the following advice for later:

    * when it comes studying kanji, focus on words that kanji is included in instead of just taking in a list of readings. this helps you avoid problems with stuff like ateji (words where characters used are used solely for their sounds), and jukujikun (words where characters are used solely for their meaning)

    * there are tons of tools at your disposal for kanji learning, which sadly teachers probably won’t mention, that could prove prove useful to memorize stubborn characters: kanji fit into one of 6 categories (rikudou), the radicals they use have meanings and are often relevant, kanji are formed from the same 350~ish parts (not every part is a radical), looking up their naritachi (how they are composed), coming up with your own mnemonics to memorize them (even a silly story can help), stroke orders can be guessed like 98% of the time, etc.

    By the way, there’s quite a bit of bad advice floating around so be careful.

  6. What is you me reason for learning Japanese? If you really want it it, you will be able to learn it. I’d a tough language to learn but it’s well worth it. Provided to live and speak it everyday.

  7. I am 35 and started learning Japanese several years ago. My level is N3 now, and I ended up living in Japan for a while. Just stay motivated and enjoy how wonderfully unique and different from the languages you know Japanese is 🙂

  8. What is ASL ? Anyways while you in class most important to learn outside as well , don’t wait. I made that mistake when I was learning a different language

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