Can I Learn Japanese As An ALT?

Tokyo is a foreigner-friendly city -
but that doesn't mean everything is in English

You might already know that the December iteration of this year's Japanese Language Proficiency Test (aka the JLPT) was cancelled. It would have been an ideal year for me to test, to be honest, since until a short while ago when I started working on my writing full-time, I had a lot of time on my hands. I did a couple of months of Japanese lessons over Zoom, went full-tilt into watching Kansai-based J-dramas to help get my dialect back after 4 years of speaking 東京方言 at work, broke out all my materials last seen at the time of passing N3 in 2015. 

There was a time when I really thought I would come back from Japan completely fluent in Japanese. That would have been nice!

It does actually work for some people, especially those out in the sticks. Or if you're naturally gifted with languages! At one point I thought I was, because I'm very good at imitating correct pronunciation, and I even started my BA with a linguistics minor. Big surprise when I discovered my language talent was only for pronunciation and I am more than useless when it comes to grammar.

There's an inaccurate belief that if you move to another country to live, you will magically pick up the language via exposure, and it's a great way to become fluent. Well, unfortunately for me, there is no magic osmosis method of learning Japanese. That isn't to say that I don't think immersion is the best way - it absolutely is. I very frequently tell potential exchange students how useful a method immersion is to learn. However, the city JET experience (and, as you well know, ESID!) frequently does not lend itself well to this. There's too much opportunity to just stay in your native language, especially now when we have Google Translate at our fingertips. Every day, I went to work; in my classroom, we used English 98% of the time. Spoke English in the English Department, spoke English after school at English Club, went home to read books in English to combat homesickness, and either hung out with my English-speaking JET neighbour or chatted in English online with my friends back home. 

It was not quite what I envisioned when I moved to Japan.

It goes without saying that I did try. I socialized with my Japanese friends, took aikido classes in Japanese, went out with my co-workers, sang karaoke, attended conversation classes or struggled through translations in my spare time. I like Japanese. I wanted to learn it - I wouldn't have even been there if not for starting my linguistics minor with that first Japanese class. What I actually needed was study, and lots of dedication, and that was tough. I did all my own lesson plans and we did not use Japanese in the classroom

Hit those books!

It shouldn't have been such a big a shock to me, but I was incredibly disappointed when I got home from Japan and immediately failed N3 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. I knew I hadn't worked hard enough. Not enough study, not enough reading, not enough repetition, and most importantly, I had assumed that I would just pick things up. I certainly did - but I didn't have enough grammatical foundation and reading skills to build on. 

I had the interest and drive, and I had 2.5 years of university classes under my belt before I arrived. If I'd received a placement in, say, Shikoku rather than Osaka (not that I would ever have given up my precious placement!), I would probably have achieved my goals with fewer distractions. Most JETs request urban placements, and Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto are right at the top. If you receive such an assignment, however, and you do want to become fluent, you need to have an incredible drive to learn in a limited amount of time. The former ALTs I know who are N1 or N2 fluent started out as country JETs, went to Japan on a student exchange program, or stayed on in Japan after finishing their placement - or all three!

So can you learn Japanese while teaching English in Japan as an ALT? The short answer is yes; you're in a prime position to pick up at least N5 level just by existing there for a year. If you want to become fluent, however, you need to work for it, as with anything - remember that it won't just come to you!

So the JLPT

Someday I will know my results.

Another JLPT come and gone, and results came out this week. I always resolve to talk a little bit more about it after I take the test, because honestly, something seems to get lost in the shuffle every time...with National Novel Writing Month happening in November, I often end up not thinking about the JLPT at all between October 31 and December 1. Not a great habit, I know, but one of these years...

The JLPT in Toronto administered by York University is one of two locations where the test is given in Canada. (The other is in Edmonton, AB.) Now, as a person who lives in The Big Smoke, I have no right to complain about how "far away" York is. (I may have done a little bit of complaining prior to my move here from the Atlantic provinces, though.) I can't even complain about the distance from my house, seeing how I chose to move away from Downsview the year before last. That doesn't mean that on test day, getting to the JLPT is a picnic!

So here is my advice for next year's JLPT applicants; common sense, to be sure, but maybe they're more of a reminder to myself for next year...?

• Aim to arrive midway through the registration period. The lineups taper off a bit towards the middle and end of the registration period. Of course, you don't want to cut it too close, and have the TTC or something else make you too late to write the test, but too early isn't great either, and you'll be lined up awhile before sitting around for an hour just waiting. And getting nervous. Not to mention that aiming to arrive for 8 AM on a day when the subways are not running (meaning leaving my house at 6:30, meaning rising at 6) is asking for you to open up that test book and be so glassy-eyed that you don't know where to start. Don't panic if something goes wrong and you're going to get there right at the end of registration time. You have a few minutes' leeway while the orientation is taking place!

• Expect to hear from York not too long after you sign up for the test. I say "not too long" because I'm not positive when it is actually supposed to come; for the last two years, I didn't receive my email with my voucher at all, and I waited far too long expecting it to come before I reached out to them. You need the voucher to write the test. Perhaps even more importantly, if you don't receive the voucher, you should still show up. Last year (2013, that is) I thought about the fact that I didn't have a voucher yet about 2 weeks before, and I contacted JLPT support. I was able to get it. This year (2014) I remembered the night before the test, as I ran through the checklist of things I needed to bring the following morning. That's why I was awake at 2 AM Googling phrases like "forgot JLPT voucher" and "JLPT York reprint voucher" and the like. I weighed whether or not it was going to be necessary to rise at 6 and go to York only to be turned away at the door. Luckily, buried somewhere on the site, I read that vouchers could be reprinted at registration. And I wasn't the only one not to receive their email - the line to reprint vouchers was much longer than any other line that morning. In short: You should receive a voucher with your test number. If you don't receive it within a few weeks of registering, ask. 

• Bring something to eat. This test is long and the breaks just barely give you enough time to inhale a small snack. Our group had technical difficulties and started late, which meant that our breaks were cut down. (For the final one, the time of the break's end even was shortened and changed after many of us had left the room.) It took much longer to finish the test than expected, by something like 45 minutes, and I was ravenous enough that after every section I was wolfing down Polish chocolates that I had won the night before as a prize at a Polish wedding reception. Not sure what I would have done without that Jezyki Kokos,  Delicje cookies and especially Katarzynki, chocolate-covered soft gingerbreads. I might not be alive right now, without Katarzynki.

As for the test itself, I don't actually know how I did on it. That's because you need the voucher to log in online to see your results, and of course, there's no voucher in my email for me to refer back to. I emailed York to get my voucher number, but the password I was provided (generated by them, not by myself) doesn't work in the login page. So did I pass? Hard to say. I guess I'll find out when the paper results are dispatched the month after next...?

Maybe next year I will be able to choose between the JLPT and NaNoWriMo as a focus. Fingers crossed for the July version making its way east someday!

That Old JLPT Feeling

I will never be an N1 Master

I have quite a few unfinished drafts hanging around in my posting queue...whoops! Things have been very very busy for me lately. I've been working a lot of overtime, ended a relationship, taken up long-distance running, gotten a cat, bought Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright. I'm pretty tired most days, so when I come home, I just want to sit at my kotatsu and space out while reading blogs. Except that a lot of the blogs I used to read daily have tapered off in post frequency or, like one of my favourites has, stopped posting entirely. While being frustrated that my daily reading content seems to be vanishing, I failed to consider that perhaps somebody out there actually likes reading my blog and was disappointed to see my posts dwindling. Well!

With that in mind, I decided today was the day for a quick post, though I suppose the topic is rather same old, same old. Last year I took a beating when I walked into the room, sat down, wrote the first section of the test, and then turned around to say to an acquaintance behind me, "Did we come to the N2 room by mistake??" It was a disaster.

This year, I tried to crack the books way back in July, with the intent to study relentlessly until October 31, and then leisurely review during November on days when I didn't have the energy for novel writing. (I don't think it's a coincidence that I have passed the JLPT and won the National Novel Writing Month challenge, but never in the same year.) Suffice to say that it's October 22 now and I'm still on Week 4 of the So-matome grammar book, with two weeks of grammar and six weeks of reading comprehension to go. I did read Chi's Sweet Home, volume 11, on the subway yesterday. That counts as study, right?

What I have been doing is kanji study, thanks to being frequently trapped on buses and trains with nothing to read and no cellphone games installed on my phone. (I was able to safely end my addiction to Hot Springs Story after beating the game for the third time.) Though there are a few apps that I've tried out before to help get daily study in, I think I've finally found "the" app for Android, and it's called KanjiSenpai. I had to turn off the drawing component pretty quickly, but otherwise I'm finding it to be really good. It uses the usual spaced repetition system (SRS) but it seems to be much better at coming back later and making sure I really know the answers to ones I guessed. Plus, it rotates between offering the meanings and the readings of compounds, as well as making you choose between several cards that are very similar, which is great for me. You can also remove cards that you're 100% certain you know - I took out number kanji, for example, and the cardinal directions, days of the week, and other kanji I use in everyday life - but the app is still going to check in with you 500 cards later and make sure you know them. If you've been looking for a good study app that will teach you the kanji rather just quizzing you on what you already learned from a textbook, this is it.

Another good one I had been using before finding KanjiSenpai was TenguGo, which cost me a dollar-something and had an interface I liked well enough. The quizzes came in small, easily-devourable packets (harder to put off studying when you can say "Meh, I'll just do one quiz,") and the tengu threw me a little on-screen party when I finished a certain number. However, it assumed you already knew all the kanji in the quiz. You can opt to "review" items (see the screenshot) but it packs just a bit too much info into its screen, and by the time I got to item #10 I had already forgotten #1. The SRS method is much better for me.

One other app I had been using before I switched to studying grammar via textbook is one called "N3 JLPT PREPARE" (yes, very descriptive) by V-Next software that does kanji, vocab and grammar quizzes. You can choose a quiz with 30 words, 50 words, 70 words, 90 words, 100 words or - not for the faint of heart - 200 words. The search function also seems good at a glance, though I never actually remember to use it. (Google Translate is always too close at hand.) My intent was to come back and use this app to quiz myself once I'd learned enough items to actually pass a quiz. Maybe it's time for a quiz right now!? I'm not getting any younger - and December 7 just gets closer and closer!

Anyone want to share their own recommendations for JLPT study apps?

My Darling is a Foreigner

The first two volumes of My Darling is a Foreigner

I have a tough time with reading in Japanese. It's unfortunate, but I've never been a patient person - this is primarily why I fail at baking, drawing, and other hobbies that require the simple skill of waiting. I have a tendency to rush - and it makes language-learning particularly hard.

For a time, I tried reading manga in Japanese to help encourage my reading skills. I tend to like the kind of manga that comes chock-full of big, complicated words and no furigana at all, though (Tezuka Osamu, I'm looking at you!) so this quickly became a failed effort. The amount of dictionary lookups it took to get through a chapter of Detective Conan made the pace mind-numbingly slow. At some point, I found Chi's Sweet Home, an adorable cat manga targeted at a younger age group, but found that not quite challenging enough. I was enjoying, but not really learning anything new when I read.

Recently, though, I've found a happy medium in「ダーリンは外国人」; My Darling is a Foreigner. I bought the two first volumes of My Darling is a Foreigner from Honto back in June, as my 'test' purchase from them to gauge the shipping costs. (Came to ¥800 - fantastic!) It's the story of a mixed married couple; she Japanese, he American with Italian-Hungarian heritage. It is a very nice departure from the usual "Japanese girl meets foreign man" plot, as the leading man, Tony, is a linguist who's very interested in wordplay and the leading lady and artist of the story, Saori, is a manga artist. They are not, by any stretch, your typical mixed couple living in Japan! There was even a comedy movie a few years back based on the franchise (it wasn't bad at all, though it also wasn't quite in line with the books) and I used to see animations based on Tony on the Yamanote Line media monitors. Natsukashii, ne!

The main draw of My Darling is a Foreigner for me, right now, is the level and pace of the comics as a study tool. The short illustrated stories in the books are usually just long enough to get in some good reading practice, and often address things that are funny to me as a linguist and student of Japanese, which makes it a perfect choice for aspiring JLPT test-takers.

The first volume, I had actually already read in the form of a translation - a bilingual version of the book was published while I was in Japan. The alternate title of one of the English prints, which was offered for a time on Amazon, was "Is He Turning Japanese?" It's still in print in the bilingual format in Japan, but much tougher to find on Amazon, so I'd recommend using the Honto.jp link I provided above if you'd like to pick it up.

Reading it in its native Japanese has been much more of a challenge than reading the bilingual version, and I can stop myself more easily from peeking at the English now, though that would certainly be a help when I'm stuck! It's good that you can enjoy these books on either level, in any case - with the English text, or without. When I finish this set, I'm definitely going to pick up the next one!

The JLPT

Soon you'll be hearing a lot on the blog about the JLPT - the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, or Nihongo Nōryoku Shiken. It's held once a year in December, and this will be my third year taking the test.

For all my years in school, I've always been abysmal at rote memorization and my test-taking skills are embarrassingly poor. While I enjoy learning, I don't enjoy studying, and forget very quickly. This is how not only am I not fluent in Japanese after two years of formal education, three years living there and another two years with a personal tutor, but my kanji skills are comparable to a second-grader's.

Yet I am someday determined to work my way up to level N2 of the JLPT. The test has five levels, starting with N5 (the easiest, I could have passed this had I taken it when I was in university) and going up to N1 (Japanese people cannot read some of the kanji on this test). The "N" (for "New") levels came in in 2010. Prior to that, there were only 4 levels, with an enormous difficult gap between 2 and 3.

I tested for level 3 in Osaka and passed it. Under the new system, that's technically "N4," so last December I wrote N3. I missed the pass mark by just a few points.

Accurate.

So this year it's back to the grind. I started studying quite late last year (September, for a December test, with National Novel Writing Month right in the middle!), so my friends and I are hoping to meet for our study group once a week from now until summer's end, and then twice a week after that. And we will be ready! Yes!

So here's a little self-intro I wrote to get in a little practice. Grammar is my worst point after kanji. Figures!

しゅみは本を読む、なつかしいテレビを見る、テレビゲームとショッピング。いつかしょうせつかになりたい。

３年かん大阪に住んでいました。関西大好き! 大阪弁もめちゃ好き。世界一番のりょうりはやはり大阪料理！でも一番好きな所は東京のお台場。いつか、そこで住んでいたい。

これは私のブログよ。下手な日本語でごめんな!

またね！