gundamhamtaro said:
i studied at SP in 98 and learnt my basic japanese there thruout my diploma. it was free cos at tt time, dept of IT was called JSIST and had relations with japan(now dont know wat happen), so i could take it as my elective. all our sensei were japanese. i had 3 different senseis, 1 for each time. the basic part was the hardest as she couldnt speak much english and we pretty much had to guess what was been taught haha. however we were only taught the basic stuff and even in the exams the answers could pretty much be copied back from the questions. this is from '98-2000 so i dont know what it would be like now though
Seems like we were in the same batch. My teacher was yuko (name, forgot her surname) sensei, yoshida sensei and sakamoto sensei. 1 thing, I din learn much from there and I thought I learnt a great deal. I stopped after that and struggled with some self study and passed the JLPT 4 on 2000.
Then I never continue for 6 years although now and then I still watch Japanese drama, read some simple Japanese text. But those lessons were useless... after more then 100 hours of Japanese lessons, I still cannot even speak simple Japanese.
This yr, I decided to join Bunka and within 2 lessons, doubts that I have held for 6 years got cleared, and the overall idea of the language is now much more better.
Alot of Japanese language school teach you textbook form and rigidly follow that. The fact is in real life, very seldom Japanese speak like this. I had a friend who finished JLPT3 standard with JCS cannot understand what's the actor speaking in a Jap drama.
What Bunka ( I dunno if other schools do the same) teaches you is the core of Japanese language - different verbs form and how they are joined to form meaningful sentences. They also teaches pratical Japanese that is suitable to be used for daily conversation, for eg. Tradition courses like the one at JSIST will teach you:
Q: Ima wa nanji desuka?
A: Ima wa roku ji desu.
The fact is the "Ima wa" in that sentence above is considered like what hokkien says GEH GAN. When you want to ask what is the time now, just say "Nan Ji desu ka?"....
Things like this really speed up the learning process because you would not spend time learning extra stuffs.
They also teach students to recognise verb forms like go-dan verib, ichidan verb... irregular at an early stage, things that many Japanese schools introduce them to students after many many lessons.
But of coz, the bad thing in Bunka is they are so concentrated on grammar and conversation that they put little emphasis on vocabulary and learning new words. But frankly... new words are easy to pick up as long as u have a dictionary with you while for grammar, you would need a native to teach you.
