From what I've read, having N1 or N2 certifications are a massive boon for getting a job in Japan, but they aren't required unless you're aiming for a job that's higher up or more business-like. And they really don't seem to mind lower level certs if the job has a "casual" atmosphere or has something to do with English. For most employers, the fact that you even bothered to get certified/take the JLPT is a plus. And the ones who want ~pro~ qualifications say something like 日本語能力N1レベルの方 or N2以上 so it's pretty easy to weed out employers who want them. Of course I'm just an American who has never lived abroad and this is all just second-hand info I've gathered by flipping through stuff online, so take it with a grain of salt ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also, I skimmed through a Japanese job site, and most of the offers for part-time restaurant/hospitality jobs just want someone who can speak conversational Japanese and has a work permit. (A pretty good chunk of these seemed pretty... laid-back/easy-going? As in, they had slang, etc. in their offers...) Some of them didn't even care if applicants know any Japanese! I guess the job situation is going to end up being a "your mileage may vary" kind of thing...

Congrats on nearly making N2, by the way! Missing it by only 10 points is pretty lame, but at least now you know you can definitely pass it next time. And as an aside... what did you think of .hack//Infection? I've been meaning to pick up one of the .hack games, because the whole game-within-a-game concept sounds pretty interesting, but I'd probably have to play it in English first if it's N2 level and doesn't give much context, haha.

Yeah, I even almost had it in my post but didn't know if it was too off-topic so I deleted it, the job ads are REALLY different from American/Swedish ones! They're telling you straight out what they want / don't want, what's okay / not okay (ex. "it's fine to request only shifts where you work with your friends", "it's fine to cancel your shift if you have a test, just talk to us first", "it's fine to only work for a single month and then quit"), what to say when you call them on the phone to ask about the job, they're using text emoticons and "lol"...!! They're even putting the amount of staff they already have according to age and gender! One of the ones for some kind of food shop literally wrote "we're used to training even people who've never held a knife before, don't worry".

I'm almost blind so my job prospects are a bit smaller than most people's but there should be some crappy part-time places that don't care; the problem is I want to get a full-time job right at the end of my exchange stay so I can move to Japan "for real", but that means they'd have to sponsor my VISA (whereas during the exchange stay, I can legally work part-time under the student VISA). And from what I understand, no one ever really wants to sponsor a VISA. While I really just want a normal Japanese job where I actually get to speak Japanese all day, my fall-back plan is doing translating / English teaching etc after my degree is done... (I like doing those things too, but I want to have a more "normal" Japanese life if you know what I mean). My goal is actually to throw away English and never use it outside of perhaps having a few blogs online like this DW here.

The .hack// games are AWESOME!! I've played the first two in English (back when I was a kid) and they localized it and stuff but you can at least play with the Japanese audio and English text if you get the American release. It's a simulated MMORPG, so there's a fake forum, fake other players (with, at least eventually, their own personalities), fake Emails and fake news articles. If you beat the normal mode on the Japanese version you unlock parody mode which I think is a lot easier to understand because they have a lot more "joke anime-like" dialogue (stuff like "please date me! give me your phone number!" "die you loser" instead of "what is this mysterious unknown virus?"). It's sort of like a mix between a basic visual novel and an RPG, since all the plot-points have dialogue with voice acting and you can sometimes choose your actions but most of the time it's just you going into dungeons and whatnot.

Edited 2017-08-24 05:44 am (UTC)

Yeah, it's kind of shocking because most American job offers are like "We want X amount of experience, Y skills and be able to work Z hours a week." But with their offers, it's like "Can you speak some Japanese and show up when we need you? Cool, go ahead and apply." I guess it's just culture shock, but it surprised me at first to read how casual some of the offers were. And failing all of that, maybe your school has someone you could talk to and see if they can find a job placement/visa sponsor or something for you? (Again I have no idea how Japanese universities work or if this is even an option for exchange students...)

Re: the giving up English thing, I kind of want to try this too, partially for more practice and partially because several of my fandoms have become rather hostile/divisive on the English-speaking side. How are you going about it? I've been trying to check Japanese fan accounts and forum threads I follow every time I get on the Internet, but I'm not really sure what else to do. Would a good start be to just cut down the amount of English websites I visit each day?

I think I'll end up picking up a completely legitimate copy of the .hack games, then! (I'd prefer to support the companies, but I have no idea how to extract games and the series is old enough that I'd be buying them second-hand anyway.) It sounds really interesting, and the combat system kind of reminds me of the Phantasy Star games, which I liked. I'm a bit nervous because I only recently made N3 and it's still a struggle for me to read anything above that without a dictionary on hand, but that's what screenshots are for!

Edited (fixed typos) 2017-08-25 03:58 pm (UTC)

For me it's not just fandom, it's literally every site I go to and person I talk to that's "English". Tumblr, Youtube, Twitter, tourists I overhear, people's freaking RECIPE BLOGS — everyone's rude/crazy/insane, super depressed/constantly negative/whatever, on tons of drugs (prescription or not), a living commercial, severe memory/eating/etc problems, doesn't read a single word of what you wrote and then assumes wrongly about everything you said, ATTACKS you for nothing, sense of humour is like a 5-year-old's, etc. The media's bad too: ignoring stuff like censored things, the news and Hollywood copy-paste movies, British/American nature documentaries have a tenth of the info that Swedish ones do for example, and all that they do say is extremely obvious ("bears are dangerous! look it's a bear!") again as if everyone's 5 years old and doesn't want to know actual real info about bears (why am I watching a documentary, then?). English Wikipedia really often censors stuff too, or otherwise has wrong and/or really outdated info compared to other-language pages. People act like English is a big language so it must have the most, best info — in reality it's the opposite. Because it's so big (and in part because the USA is controlled by companies), it has the most MISinformation and PROPAGANDA information!

I always noticed this stuff a little but I REALLY started noticing it a few years ago when Tumblr started getting popular, and it's gotten worse and worse with every year until it's just so bad now I literally am xenophobic towards English-speakers because it's like only 1/100 end up being decent. (And it's not just people from English-speaking countries: coincidentally, ameriboos and stuff act exactly the same way, just slightly less.) It's just all this stuff like... I search for something in English and I find "this is just how you're born, it just runs in your family, it's uncurable and unavoidable etc!", I search in Swedish or something and I get "this is entirely dependant upon your diet, it's curable if you just eat lemons". Over and over.

Every single time I talk about basically anything I usually talk about, I have to explain the entire concept and BATTLE with people because they don't know anything about it and yet instead of just looking things up, they immediately take the opposite side from me for no reason. Ex. people HATE my diet (=no processed foods) and find any way they can to attack me on it or say it'd be impossible for them despite them never having tried it, never reading about it or comparing prices; I get stuff like Americans living in Japan telling me it'd cost an arm and a leg to eat this way there and "good luck coming here lol you won't survive". Despite that 1. the cheapest food in every country tends to be the traditional, using raw/unprocessed ingredients; 2. more nutrients in the food = you eat a lot less and thus spend less money; 3. wow, if you do stuff like cut out your daily Starbucks, candybars and cake, and make meals at home instead of eating out, surprize, you actually end up SAVING money.

I can barely stand English fandom nowadays too; I keep trying and keep trying but my "fandom friends" always end up being people whose idea of fandom is 1. thinking you can't go outside what canon literally said/showed on-screen ("they didn't SAY that Shinji's gay for Kaworu!"), or 2. their idea of "fanstuff" is taking a commercial and replacing the actors with whatever random two characters they like without changing a single thing. "It would be funny if Shinji ate cookies exactly like in my fave commercial". And then there's the fanfic. There's something about modern fic, where it just feels like the person has no idea what fiction is (it reads like a blog post or something, not like fiction) and it doesn't feel like they've put any "feeling" into it. It used to be that you could read someone's really crappy fic and you could still instantly tell that they had a great time writing it, but now it's like people are writing to be cool or make a political point or something.

The only respite I seem to find is on DW / LJ but even there the "good people" seem to be slooowly shrinking (for some reason DW seems to have more sane people than LJ nowadays too)....

I'm trying to just slowly replace everything with Japanese/another language, ex. out of like 50 people I'm following on Twitter only like 3 use English; when I play a videogame I make sure it's in Japanese, even if I can't understand it; I'm trying to do stuff like blocking YouTube comments so I don't read them. What I really want is a greasemonkey script or something that can detect a page/page content and block it by language (=hide all English) but that doesn't exist. But I think this method is too slow, and the English I do see in most places really aggravates me (I also think about just how much time I'm wasting doing stuff in English).

I think the real problem with not being able to let go of English is just when you don't know another BIG language well enough. I for example, simply can't find info about various topics in Swedish because Sweden is so small. I can't play videogames or read scanlations in Swedish because none exist. So when I Google for info it tends to be in English... but in Japanese I can do everything I can in English (and more), I just have to get to the point where I understand everything. And since I'm not at that point yet, I keep falling back to English.

But when I was a kid I read a billion books and watched a billion TV shows without understanding even half of what was going on, and that's how I learned English. I still find new words I've never heard before (like "stopgap") in English today. Even when I DO know all the words, that really doesn't guarentee I understand what the person's actually trying to say (or that they understand MY words). So I keep trying to remind myself: if I've been studying Japanese for 2 years, I should judge myself on the level of a literal 2-year-old Japanese kid. And maybe I should be open to practicing Japanese the way a 2-year-old does (=constantly getting Japanese input even if I can't output / understand).

I also really need to just cut off my regrets and look at the greater good, but it's really hard! That one guy I like talking to only speaks English? Well I should cut him out of my life anyway because he's part of the problem — if he really wants to talk to me, he'll learn Esperanto or use Google Translate or something; if he can't be bothered then he's not a "real friend" that I'd be keeping for years anyway. A site like Tumblr's just impossible, because it's an "English" site so no matter what you do you're going to stumble across English-speakers: time to give it up. I want to read (or reread) that book? Well I've had 25 years to read books in English, time to stop. That kind of stuff.

Let's say I spend 2/3rds of the day in English and 1/3rd in Japanese. Even if it only takes me 3 years to learn Japanese.......... I could've learnt it in ONE year if I had only thrown away the English parts of my day. Time goes on no matter how you spend it. Next week will come (...or won't come) no matter if you use English or not. If you'd rather be "a lot better" at Japanese than "a little better", you have to start throwing away English. I mean, of course you can use stuff like translation dictionaries, but don't sit around listening to the radio or blogging in English, it's that kind of thing....

I say all that but it really is hard! If you're going to try and do it too I'd feel more confident in me doing it myself haha. It's hard alone!!

EDIT: oh and the thing is just, when you go on JAPANESE twitter or something like that, you're struck by how amazingly nice and sensible most people are. same as with the job ads, it's like "wow this is a utopia!". even when these guys strongly disagree, they just "disagree", it doesn't dissolve into stuff like hate messages and capslock insults. so every time i come back to the english side i'm like, wtf am i doing here?? why am i so stupid, why don't i just stay over there?? it's just habit.

Edited 2017-08-25 07:53 pm (UTC)

for extracting the games, you literally just put the disk into your computer and make a "disk image" (iso file). disk utility on a mac can do this, i don't know about other OSes. i recommend doing it in general so your disk drive doesn't accidentally eat/scratch up/explode on your disk or something.

i do that too!! i take screenshots of words i don't know (which used to be like every line of dialogue — i don't recommend taking that many LOL), and nowadays you can use an OCR site/app to grab the text so you don't even have to try handwriting or finding the radicals of the kanji. and when you find lines you don't understand, just post them here on the comm and i'll help if i know what they're saying!!

Oh, also since the game is so old you really don't have to worry about not understanding when you play it; there's tons of walkthroughs in both English and Japanese, and you can't really get "lost" as it marks which place you're supposed to go to next in order to advance the story. If you can't warp to an area it just means you have to fulfill special conditions (ex. it says "go alone" or "go with x and y people") but it'll actually say that in the area description and have it reworded again when you try to go there without fulfilling the conditions so... I think it's probably fine.

I'm playing on an emulator, it's really handy as you can speed up the game when you're not viewing cutscenes / you can save right before a boss battle. If you play, my biggest tips:
• Boss battles (they're always special in-game events, they won't appear in totally random dungeons) have purple smoke at the doorway, so save before those.
• As soon as you get to a new server (and can), always take 2 party members, hit the "random area" button until you find the highest-level area you can for that server, go fight there and level up a ton just by going through the same dungeon 3-4 times. You can just exit and re-enter the dungeon without leaving the actual area and returning to town. Then the rest of the game, including all the boss battles, is a piece of cake.
• Don't bother striving to get the absolute best weapons or anything because what's unavailable in game 1 is available at high-level dungeons at the beginning of game 2 etc. Your save data transfers between games so you get to keep all your stats and equipment and stuff.

Here's a mini tutorial I made for how to use the PS2 emulator with .hack//:
http://ioj.dreamwidth.org/260.html

(Of course, you can *cough* find .iso files on mysterious internet websites I've *cough* never been to, instead of buying the disks and creating your own)