Blogs

Missed Your Opportunity To Study Abroad in College? Think Again!

Were you more focused on…er…extra-curricular activities in college? Maybe you didn’t study a language in college, or maybe you didn’t attend college? Whatever the reason, not all of us are blessed enough to study abroad to learn a language while we’re young. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t take advantage of the opportunity today...

Thus far, you’ve learned the basics of constructing sentences in Japanese.

You know that when making a sentence, you must follow a subject-object-verb formula. You also know that Japanese uses particles and these particles follow the words they modify rather than precede them. Finally, you know that the subject, topic, or object must be denoted by particles such as wa (subject), ga (topic), and o (object). For example...

You’ve been studying Spanish a while and decide to take the next step: You’re going to a Spanish speaking country. Just make sure that you have researched the country well and I am not talking necessarily about safety and the hotspots but the vocabulary! That’s right, the vocabulary. Crazy?!? I don’t think so.

Many countries do not use the same exact vocabulary that we learn in the classroom. That seems obvious, but even the vocabulary we use in class may have a different connotation depending on the country you choose to visit. Two classic cases of miscommunication are local terminology and interpretation...

The best way to learn a language undoubtedly is immersing oneself into the culture and language. However tons of adult learners turn studying abroad down. Some excuses are "I have a family", "I’m too old", and "It’s too expensive" among others.

From personal experience, people always thought how great it was that as a young woman I was out and about in the world, trying to learn a bunch of languages. But the people who I admired were the older study abroad students. At the age of 18 and 19 I was giving up on language because I couldn’t do it but when I say adult learners progressing everyday and catching onto the language I thought, hey, maybe at 19 I can’t do it, but if I study for another 25 years, I may catch on. I thought it was so great to see adult learners in the classroom and it really motivated me as a student.

Everyone says you have to travel and study abroad while you’re young. But it’s a lie. It’s better as an adult student. Here’s why...

Japanese vocabulary is not particularly hard to learn.

The steadily increasing exposure to Western culture after the Second World War has resulted in a large vocabulary of borrowed words, albeit in a heavily Japanized form. The native Japanese vocabulary isn’t particularly difficult, especially once you get used to certain sentence structures. For questions, of course, you can use a sort of template to make sentences using different vocabulary...

"I've never encountered anyone like this..."

"...he absolutely blew my mnd."

These remarks come from a British documentary called The Boy with the Incredible Brain. As language students, we all wish we could experience hyper-accelerated learning, because it would certainly save us a lot of time & effort.

There are tons of study methods out there, but which one works for you?

The first thing to remember is, YES, you can learn a new language, you just need to find a method that fits your learning style. Also define what you want to learn. Sometimes people do not necessarily want to speak the language, they may only want to read or write it. Depending on your focus, you should choose your study method accordingly...

You may already be aware that there are two types of Japanese – polite and plain. Formal and informal. Casual and black tie, if you will. When studying travel guides and other tourist literature, chances are that all of the Japanese you see there is in polite form. It’s extremely easy to tell plain and polite apart. First, a little science...

Hey people, this video is Close-Captioned (click on CC in the player to get English sub-titles)!

It's another interesting exploration of the topic: using video games to learn world languages.

Some say that the Asian languages are the most difficult in the world, especially for English speakers. Most of us just look at the various character symbols and shiver in fear, thinking that this is absolutely impossible. But why should we be intimidated by these little characters?

Patience

The Asian languages are no different than the rest of the languages out in the world. Every language has its advantages and disadvantages according to the learner. You will not learn a new language overnight, so don’t get frustrated and think the language is too hard to learn. We often use symbols in English and we understand the meaning like ♥, ☺, ♀, and ♂. Now apply the same thought process to Asian symbols.

Let’s use Japanese as our case study...