public service announcement:

if you're thinking about jobs in japan, it's going to be an insanely good time to look for english-teaching jobs starting around next month (or now??) because the entire country is going to start teaching english from 3rd grade instead of 5th for the first time, starting in april. my friend just got a job teaching english last week, by literally just walking into the school and asking even though they weren't hiring. apparently their teacher quit the day before so they were desperate!

you don't have to be a native english speaker (in fact most english teachers are just "random foreigners" and lately japan is pushing the "french-accented, swedish-accented etc english is english too!!" concept) but i think i saw on one job ad that if you're not a native, your TOEIC skills have to be at least 800.

average entry-level salary (stuff like working at a kindergarten while not having any kind of degree) seems to be 1,100 to 1,400 yen per hour (compare to 750-850 for convenience store work); higher salary is 3,000 (stuff like working a company's branch office while having a bachelor's degree). because their main target audience is in school/at work all day, most english-teaching jobs are part-time unless you land a job at an actual middle school or something like that, but unlike what i've read online it seems to actually be possible to get a work permit via having multiple part-time jobs...?

I got some good news about this for my own case today so I'll write about it here. There's a few different ways you can enroll in Japanese studies in Japan, thus getting a student VISA and getting to live there.

1. Exchange program from your home country's school that already offers it. If you're a university student, you'll pay your home university tuition cost (ex. in my case, Swedish universities are free so I didn't have to pay tuition to my Japanese exchange school either). If you're a gymnasium/highschool student, you might have to pay a "program fee" (the money goes to the group organizing your exchange for you; if you stay with a host family, the host family might get paid a bit of it to cover your expenses with them). Usually you need to have studied to JLPT N4 (= Genki I and II) before you're allowed to go on exchange.

Entirely depending on your school, you can be in a host family or not. I've heard of university students who got host families but my Japanese school doesn't offer that.

( Read more... )

If you can get a job and stay in Japan without a degree, proven Japanese knowledge, whatever, DO THAT!! If your uncle owns a takoyaki business in Osaka and will get you a VISA no problem, go for it!! But this is for us other folks, sigh.

If you're curious about what getting a 3-year university degree (= BA) in Japanese is like, look at my page here.

Hi guys, I have about a week of winter break starting now and I just discovered that the NDS Japanese (/Japanese-English) dictionary is a lot better than what I was using before, including about grammar. So as much as possible, I'm going to update the entire JLPT grammar post with new meanings reflecting what I find in this better dictionary. I've also been "learning" (not really) JLPT N1 grammar in class so I'll be adding all that, including the teacher's example sentences, to the same post as soon as I can.

Do you guys have any specific questions about grammar or word usage? I'm getting a Japanese tutor so I should be able to ask them whatever, including anything you guys come up with. For example, if I can't find it out online I'm going to ask what's the difference between や and やら (which I keep finding in novels but nowhere else).

Slowly updating the layout. If you're red-green colourblind let me know how well you can see the changes in link color when you hover....

1. I've cleaned up the tags and fixed the profile, hopefully things are more organized now.

2. Remember that you guys can post too!! Post whatever you want!! How's learning going? What did you learn/read/listen to yesterday? Confused about anything?

Greetings members! I'm a bad mod, but I'm surprised and happy to see that there's a few people on our member list now.

Since I'm a very slow and inactive user, we now have a second mod of the community, lusentoj. We're best friends and roommates IRL and have both been learning Japanese on and off for some time. He's very interested in alternative study methods and memorisation techniques, as well as etymology and decoding grammar, so I'm sure he'll be happy to talk with those of you struggling with remembering kanji, or kunyomi/onyomi readings, etc. (I'm more of a "intake media in the target language and naturally learn all the common stuff" and "I already gave up on kanji 10 years ago" type of person.)

Feel free to contact him as well as me if you have any questions, comments or concerns about the community. PMs are fine, comments are fine. Since I work long days and barely have time to go online right now, please don't think you're being ignored if it takes some time to get an answer.

We're planning on changing the community layout soon, to make it more accessible for users like lusentoj (who is visually impaired). If you have any suggestions or requests about anything to do with the comm, leave a comment.

よろしくお願いします！

This is a community for anything related to learning the Japanese language.

Allowed content: questions, tips, information, practice posts, discussions, and anything else that seems relevant to talk to other learners about (or eventual fluent speakers who want to teach).

Not allowed: stuff that isn't related to learning Japanese in any way (including posts about Japanese media/etc if the topic doesn't somehow relate to learning the language).

General rules:

- Post relevant content in your posts (see above). Comments are more open to variation, but please keep very personal discussions to PMs between users, or your personal journals.

- Be nice, don't be elitist or judgmental, etc.

- No starting fights. Disagree politely and respect others.

- Don't spam the community. Try to post a maximum of once a day (per user). If you came up with something else to post, you can save it until tomorrow. There is no recommended limit to commenting, of course.

- Posts and comments in both English and Japanese are allowed, but if you're going to write in any other language, please include a translation or summary of your writing in either English or Japanese so that more users can have a chance at understanding what you're writing in the community. Even though posting exclusively in Japanese is allowed, it might help beginners if you include a translation or summary as well, although it's not required.

- Tag your posts! It helps keep things tidy and makes it easy for everyone to search through the community for specific posts.

- Contact the mod(s) if you want new tags added, or if you have other problems or questions.