Kansai Gaidai University

Japanese is a tough language, even in Japan. You need to be self-motivated and put a lot of effort into it. I didn't have a lot of motivation and I'm really lazy so I didn't really improve as much as I would have liked to. Kind of a shame but oh well.

My speaking parter only wanted to learn english, but she was still a very cute and wonderful girl. I don't have any problem getting around, even though my Japanese is awful (the class hasn't taught me anything practical yet)

My level of Japanese speaking ability flourished exponentially upon arrival. This happened through a combination of staying with host families, intensive study, and making Japanese friends

Japanese is different from my first language, it was really hard and the language studies took up alot of my time.

I've found that while I'm nowhere close to being fluent, I can speak much more easily and fluidly than before.

Whilst in Japan I took a good shot at trying to improve my Japanese language ability. Japanese language classes gave me a good base to work on my hyoujyungo (standard intonation), and outside of class and study, I would just go hang out with my Japanese and foreign friends, have fun and speak in Japanese. I would try to speak in Japanese most of the time and would write down a new word when I heard it in note pad and then review this pad as vocabulary later. Although this will drive you crazy after a while, I found that I needed to submerse myself in the language in order to learn it. It all ended up being really worthwhile, in terms of not only learning the language, but meeting a lot of good people, and especially in getting to know my host family better.