JAPN 1020

This class is a lot of work. I mean a LOT of work. The work isn't necessarily hard, but it is very consistent. The classes run Monday to Thursday, and almost every single one of those days has something (usually a worksheet, sometimes an audio recording) due at 11:59 PM, and usually something to prepare before class the next day (sometimes also another worksheet, sometimes reading and memorizing a conversation in Japanese).

This is a good thing and a bad thing. If nothing else, it really does help you learn the language, since you'll be practicing it in some capacity near daily. But as someone who has a lot of other commitments over the course of the semester, it was also a consistent source of stress for me, since there was always something more to be done.

I will also say, this is the one class all semester where I've had perfect attendance. Attendance is basically mandatory, since we do a lot of in class practice and speaking in Japanese, which again, is good for learning the language, but also is usually the longest 50 minutes of my day. It's also a pretty small class, so your absence will be noticed by everyone. On the other hand, though, since you're talking with everyone anyway, it's a good class if you like meeting and talking with new people.

I, personally, may be biased, because I don't think I did that well in it. I'm writing this before looking at my end-of-semester grades to try and keep this as neutral as possible, but I don't think I was able to give this class the time it needed in order to actually do well in it. I'm not very good at keeping lots of conjugation patterns or mostly-unused vocabulary in my head which, as you might imagine, doesn't do me any favors in a foreign language class. I still do enjoy the language and studying it, but I wish I had more time to drill a lot of the content into my head.

But the instructor is super nice. She seems to genuinely care about each of her students, and sometimes I actually worry in the opposite direction that she has too much work actually going through, grading, and writing personalized feedback on almost all of our assignments (sometimes I see the grades be posted in the middle of the night, and all that). She makes a great effort to make the class engaging and understandable to everyone, and I cannot recommend her as an instructor enough.

I would recommend this class if you have the time to be taking it, just not if you're also already bound to a lot of other high-commitment stuff (work, clubs, etc).

Don't take this course if you are interested in Japanese. This course is worse than learning by yourself for 3 reasons.

1) class is discussion based. You talk to people who actually have no clue about the language. You won't improve when everyone knows nothing about the language but are speaking in incomplete Japanese.
2) class has insane workload. You get two homeworks everyday and 3 quizzes every two weeks and 3 test a semester AND a final exam except for the quizzes everything is graded harshly.
3) Every course material are meant for you to study by yourself which means there are no lessons and if you can do that just study on your own don't take this course.
4) grades aren't transparent. You don't get to know what you got wrong on tests and you can't negotiate with the instructor.

I got an A- for this course but at the cost of losing interest in Japanese and being frustrated about grading.