Japanese Diary - Japanese Lessons!

Since coming to Japan, I knew one of my main goals was to become better at Japanese, so of course the obvious thing I needed to do once I got here was join a language class. I was lucky enough to be introduced to some free, volunteer based Japanese lessons pretty quickly, and although I was originally prepared to pay for classes I'm so glad I have these now instead!

The format seems a little strange at first; the class is run by volunteers and is for learning both English and Japanese. So Japanese residents are there as well as foreigners, and mostly they are teamed up to talk to one another and learn from one another. Although, most of the volunteers do speak both languages, so in my case I was paired with a volunteer, Soma-Sensei, and she teaches me a little more formally (print outs from work books and kanji drills etc.). It's pretty good, especially since she used to be a teacher before. She also kind of chose me, as she loves England, which is cool. She lived there for a couple of years, in Reading too! So she was really excited when I said I lived near there (even her email address is her old Reading Postcode!). As well as that though, every other week there are slight changes to the format, where people are asked to form small groups and talk about a specific subject etc. which is great from a getting to know new people side, as well as being forced to communicate with people who may not share English as a language!

In all, I think these lessons are great for me! I'm already learning a lot, and the chance to talk to natives who are really interested in talking to me, as well as talking to other Japanese learners at a similar level to me is really helping me to cement concepts such as grammar patterns, which I struggle with! Now to just cram vocabulary in my own time and I'll be good... eventually. I really want to aim for N4 in December, maybe I can do it! (Or not...)

This is kind of a short one, but I thought it was an important thing to talk about, if you know where to look then finding quality language lessons is possible!

But for now, またね〜 From Osaka