I was recently starting my journey to learning Japanese (around 6 months ago) and when I was going around Tokyo I happened to run into a student from the school I planned to go to long term (I was currently enrolled in but had not yet started a short term program and I had a plan to do a long term year program). The student was able to speak effortlessly in Japanese but they shared that it was due to having previously learned other languages first, and that their classmates all weren’t comfortable talking in public at restaurants and relied on this person whenever they went out together, despite being N2 level (roughly B2 ish on the CEFR scale, for those unfamiliar it’s fluency in all daily life stuff and some more complicated things, but not quite university level, it usually takes around 1-2 years to achieve this level when studying full time). I was shocked because the school advertised being especially focused on speaking (for Japanese specifically the N levels test doesn’t test speaking at all so some schools only help you to pass the test for the purpose of obtaining a visa, etc.).
After hearing all this I had an identical experience in my short term program, within the first few lessons it was clear that the lessons were taking the same “building block” approach, of rote memorizing phrases and then trying to use them, I also tried to do private lessons from the same school and found it was focused on learning specific grammar terms, meaning each private lesson had to be focused on a specific grammar lesson or grammar element, and it focused on trying to explain when to use each type, vs trying to show it via examples.
The last aspect that bothered me about this was the tendency for teachers to not speak any other languages but their native language (in this case Japanese). This isn’t because I needed them to speak English (rather I prefer to learn in the target language) but I’ve noticed that without speaking another language a language teacher will have a difficult time being completely effective. They can explain things but they don’t understand the frustration and gaps and struggles that learners go through. They are teaching something they have literally known their entire life, I have found that the tutors who speak another language (any other language) tend to be much more effective in supporting learning and knowing when and how to help vs treating language learning like a series of “tests”.
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