Moving to Japan

Open Forum
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I’ll be moving to Japan in August and have begun to learn the Hiragana and Katakana characters using JapanesePod101, so far so good. Once I have a good handle on that I want to move on to some kind of program to augment my LingQ. I love the Assimil program for Spanish, and I saw there there is a 2-part Japanese Assimil. Has anyone used the Japanese Assimil program? What did you think? I’ve also heard that the Genki program is really good too.

Any recommendations would be appreciated. This is going to be a challenge not only because I’m an American learning Japanese, but I will also be endeavoring to learn this language while maintaining and continuing to improve my Spanish which I hope to get to a C1 level by the end of 2017. Luckily I have time as I should be in Japan for at least 3 years.

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Here is a video from a Canadian guy living in Japan, talking about learning Japanese:

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It’s very hard

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Great link. Thank you.

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If you are going to be in Japan for 3 years, I recommend making the (considerable) effort to learn the Kanji. Start with the kana, read as much as you can, and look for texts that introduce Kanji. You will also need a separate system for learning Kanji. Then lost of listening and reading. Since you are in the country, use it where you can, since the Japanese are very encouraging, no matter how poorly you speak their language. That is not the case in all countries.

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Thank you for the advice, I’ll keep that in mind!

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