[Not yet proofread; corrections welcome; criticism invited . . . ]
This was originally going to appear as a section in one of the earlier entries, but I never got around to writing it, so it it being promoted to its own entry.
As far as modern education systems are concerned, I have a penchant for cynicism. This of course is not entirely unfounded, but I shall attempt to refrain from overindulging in it. Naturally, this also implies that my actual opinions may be more severe than those that I am presenting.
My aim
First the objectives of this endeavour must be taken into consideration. While I may have varied reasons for learning Japanese, the immediate goal is quite simply to be perfectly indistinguishable from an above average, educated native speaker in all matters relating the language.
The school's claim
We offer classes at all levels from foundation[sic] courses for the absolute beginner through to advanced programs for students requiring high levels of proficiency for professional careers or Japanese universities & graduate schools.
However, as can be seen from the above quote from the school's programme catalogue, our goals don't quite align, but seem to intersect to some degree. This, in and of itself, is expected and quite normal. In all the second language programmes and schools I have seen to date, the highest proficiency is considered to be that by which one is able to conduct himself professionally in the target language or attend graduate school. Unfortunately, while perhaps a lofty goal in some respects, this falls far short. Since I haven't completed this stage of the adventure yet, I can yet tell you how short.
Evaluating the claim
Nonetheless we can make some vague approximations. Consider that a student can generally graduate from the highest level class at the school I attend even if he entered the school with no knowledge of Japanese within two years. At 26 hours of class per week, 11 weeks per term, and 4 terms per year, this is the result of 〜2200 hours of study at this school. Looking at the US Government Foreign Service Institute's data on class time required to achieve certain proficiency levels, this should be equivalent to the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR)'s level 3 proficiency (general professional proficiency) [ speaking | listening | reading | writing ].
For the most part the description that the school advertises and these descriptions align. The primary difference is that the ILR attempts to be much more objective and points out what someone with this proficiency will not be able to do. Thus, I prefer their descriptions. This also explains why it is very unlikely that you will ever find me in marketing: unless I believe I understand your objectives and this the product or service I am selling will meet them precisely, I will start by telling you all the things that the product or service won't do for you.
Upon considering the above, I had no doubts that by entering the school and following their programme and curriculum I would achieve the said proficiency, nor do I have any such doubts after completing the first term of my studies here.
Another potential problem
Another more serious concern arises instead. Most humans seem to enjoy categorising everything into mutually exclusive compartments. "My favourite movie is AB." "The hardest language to learn is Urdu." "American Christians are better than Saudi Muslims." "These are the five level of language proficiency." People also assume that these compartments are linearly connected. "My next favourite movie is CD and my least favourite is YZ." "To get to proficiency level 5, you first go through my road, 1, 2, 3, and then 4." While perhaps some people actually organise their mind in this manner so that they really do have distinct favourites, orders, difficulty levels, such a system fails to represent the world at large. This world at large include language learning.
Thought experiment (flawed as it may be): consider a mountain named the language of your choice; in my case, Japanese. Near the top is a plateau that is well-educated adult native proficiency. The peak is reserved for only the best of the best authors, orators, poets. There are various camps along the way: each is at the end of a path, a course of study, personal, institutional, or otherwise. Some of the paths start from sea level, some from other camps, and yet others branch off from other paths. Altitude may be loosely associated with proficiency. There are multiple camps around the mountain at similar proficiency levels. One of the paths, the one requiring the least discipline to follow and leading to near the highest plateau, is restricted to a single starting point: the baby born into that environment.
The path of the language school is but one, and it ends at a camp around the altitude referred to by the ILR as level 3. The problem that concerns me, for I know not whether it exists, is the nature of the path from that camp to the plateau, should one even exist. Having never met anyone who has made a similar journey, the path ahead is largely unknown. This, however, is part of the fun. The mountain is only a poor representation of the situation, but it serves to illustrate part of my concern. Is there a better path to the top and is following this path impeding my final goal?
Fortunately learning a language is not a mountain, and even if it were, I could walk two paths at once. Regardless, throughout the term, I have run into a number of conflicts between my path and my goal and the school's.
Four nearly independent skills
On the ILR website, the descriptions for their categorisations of speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills are separate, and for a good reason: they are largely independent. Much more than you may expect if you only know your native language or languages. There is still a relationship between them: listening and speaking are like a parent and child, as are reading and writing, but listening and writing are more like third cousins, twice removed. In Japanese in particular this divide seems much greater than in English, but I obviously think more about it than English, so my perspective is somewhat jaded.
Since I studied Japanese on my own prior to coming to study at this school, my reading ability far exceeded my speaking ability. As such I attempted to prepare myself mentally for a remedial term of study. Those of you who know me are well aware that such an experience is rather bitter. I tend to have a fairly reasonable retention rate when the subject matter is of interest, and generally believe review to be a waste of time unless a specific deficiency has been found and is being addressed.
Preface to the term
Two days after arriving in Japan, I wrote the placement exam and had an interview to determine which class I would be placed it. The written exam was relatively simple, but I essentially failed the interview. It didn't help that they were asking questions about things I don't care about or hold shall we say alternate views on.
T: "What's happened in the news recently in Canada?"
N: "Um, I don't watch the news; the Canadian news has nothing to do with learning Japanese."
T: "What sort of country is Canada?"
N: "From what perspective?"
T: "I want to go to Canada and make friends there, what should I do?"
N: "Huh!? What the fuck sort of question is that? You do the same thing that you do to make friends anywhere else."
(I of course used more polite language, but these were the English replies in my head.^^;)
For better or worse, I didn't know how to say "from what perspective?", "what the fuck?", or form a sentence with two nested subordinate clauses in Japanese, at least not while speaking. As a result I ended up in the fifth class from the bottom. There were seventeen classes in the term. I didn't mind that I was in the fifth from the bottom; what bothered me was the fact that everything was going to be review. I was hoping that I'd end up in a class where the first month-and-a-half would be review and after that we'd start covering new material.
However, since my speaking really was lamentable, I decided I would put up with the review, and thus my first term started.
The term begins
If you've made it this far, you'll probably last until the end of this entry. The substance has finally arrived. I'm sure you'll notice that my prefaces and disclaimers generally outweigh the actual content I deliver.
The initial composition of our class was 4 Americans, 2 Canadians, 2 Brasilians, a Czech, a New Caledonian, a Swede, a Taiwanese, and an Israeli. In the second week the Swede was replaced by another Taiwanese after which the class remained through the end of the term.
There were five teachers assigned to the class, only one of whom was male, and even then he only taught our class for two hours per week due to the rarity of men in Japanese second language education. This particularly unfortunate as the way men and women speak in Japanese differs greatly unlike English.
Disclaimer
If I seem particularly harsh on the teachers, it is probably because I have had the pleasant experience of having two superlative English language teachers in the past, one of whom could read Old English, German, French, and Latin. For those more familiar with Japanese, think of Old English as the equivalent of man'yōgana (万葉仮名). It's essentially a complete different language, not Shakespeare's English!
Initial impressions
The students were reasonably normal, as were the teachers. Maybe even a little too normal. I somewhat miss my eccentric professors and classmates with motivation. It's not that my classmates weren't motivated, just that they weren't to the degree that I've grown accustomed to.
Ineffective assignments
For homework, or any variety of study to be effective, it needs to stretch the limits of the learner. Of course, it also needs to be within his reach. In my math and physics courses, for the most part the homework was very effective. It required effort and a mental stretch, even only a slight one, to complete, and upon completion, the student's understanding had increased. It's one thing to have your professor tell you that the singing in a(n idealised) shower may be modelled with a wave equation, and it's an entirely different matter to construct the model and solve it for standing waves.
Unfortunately, the homework assigned was largely ineffective, being overly simplistic in nature. Of course, learning a language is a far cry from math and physics, so the homework should be different, but it should still stretch the understanding of the student.
The Japanese system of inflection and agglutination (think conjugation) is extremely regular; it's nearly impossible to make an error outside of the typographical. Yet, a large portion of homework assignments included such exercises. This was a waste of both the student's and the teacher's time.
After about six weeks, I stopped doing the assigned homework in favour of my own studying. When questioned why I wasn't handing in the homework, I attempted to explain that it was ineffective. I'm still not sure whether I failed to effectively convey that or whether the teachers are simply rutted in their ways and unable to accept the possibility. (At this point we interrupt our regular programming to bring you this friendly statistic. Of all the OECD countries, Japan ranks 10th from the bottom in terms of productivity. The only countries below it are the likes of the Slovak Republic. If you then take into consideration the obvious fact that they severely under-report their working hours, realistically, they're probably in the bottom 3. It's not that I don't appreciate some of the effects. I mean it's nice that there are three employees to direct and stop traffic for me as I cross the the road to the southwest entrance of the grocery store.)
In the end, after ceasing to do the assigned homework, my test marks went up.
Elective classes
In the programme in which I am enrolled, there are 20 standard classes per week and 4 elective classes. At this level the only electives are kanji 1, 2, and 3, reading, and writing. This makes sense as an elective on Japanese history in the Edo period would exceed the students language skills.
Although I didn't select them, the kanji electives were supremely lame. (Kanji are the Chinese characters used in the Japanese writing system.) And well, that's part of the reason I didn't select them. Each of the electives covered about 15 kanji a week. In the three weeks before I left for Japan, I studied at least 25 per day. That's a more than an order of magnitude of difference. There are 1945 kanji classified as everyday use kanji by the government and that all Japanese school children learn by ninth grade. An native adult can probably ready closer to at least 3000. At the rate of 15 per week, it would take two-and-a-half years before you would be able to pronounce the characters that appear in a newspaper, and at least four years before you could comfortable pronounce almost all modern publications. (Newspapers are restricted to only use the everyday-use kanji; most other publications are free to use any of the 45,000 or so characters they feel like. Realistically, they don't go past 6000.)
The reading elective had good and bad points. On the bad side, except for two of the stories that we read, I've ready all of them before. And even then, they were overly easy, at least for my reading level, but I already knew that's stronger than my other skills. The bright side was this elective was taught by our male teacher and we practised reading the stories aloud after him. It would have been more useful if he would have corrected our pronunciation, but that would require polynomial time.
The writing elective was chosen mainly because the other electives (kanji 1, 2, and 3) were so bleak. I'm not a believer in early output. There's no reason to write a recipe before you read 10 recipes written in Japanese by a native speaker; there's no reason to write a review of a movie until you've read 10 reviews written in Japanese by a native speaker. The actual numbers for initial input should probably be higher. If you don't read a significant bit of native material pertinent to the subject matter about which you're going to write, you end up sounding like a foreigner because you're not familiar with the patterns that occur in that style of writing. Output before input makes no sense aside from perhaps giving students and teachers a false sense of accomplishment. Alas, this tirade will have to be saved for another time.
Testing
Oh, fie, the return of multiple choice tests . . . In my seventeen or so years as a student, I have written one effective multiple choice test: it was on mechanics; right answers minus wrong answers; and, it was a good challenge. Okay, okay, so the tests this term weren't really multiple choice (the bit about the one effective multiple choice test is still true) and were generally effective as tests; however, there is a limit to what tests indicate. They were also too easy for my liking, but perhaps that's the way they should be. I still prefer tests where the average is 45% and the standard deviation is 15%. Tests with an average of 84% aren't any fun. This may also be interpreted as when the average is 84% it makes it bloody impossible to clear the next highest mark by 10%.
End of the term
In the last week, we wrote a test very similar to the placement test at the beginning of the term. Afterward, I had a teacher pull my results for both tests. The result was rather disappointing. My score entering the term was higher than a fair number of students leaving the term, and my score leaving the term only improved marginally. This, of course, is because I didn't really learn anything new, or at least not in class.
Speeches
Students for whom the previous term was their last gave a brief speech before everyone from all seventeen classes on the final day. I was hoping to notice some significant difference between the students in my classes and in the intermediate and advanced classes, but was rather disappointed.
The vast majority of students didn't actually prepare anything, and most of those who did certainly didn't practice delivery. With the exception of two students from the top three classes, everyone else's speeches were a let down. This is the result of having high expectations. Yet, not all is lost; many people are poor at given speeches even in their native language and those two students provided a brief glimmer of hope.
