Japanese VCE

Wow, that does sound quite difficult as the year is wrapping up? Also, Japanese is one of the harder subjects as with any language. I'm doing 3+4 jap, and a good understanding of 1+2 is quite important, especially the grammar points. Unless you work a ton and also over the summer you may not have time.. To be ready for 3+4 you would want to have all the grammar points learnt + kanji + most of the vocab. Year 11 jap has a lot of stuff in it, you learn even more grammar points than in yr 12.

Happy to see a Japanese discussion thread though.

Currently doing 1&2 Japanese! I'm very glad that you've decided to do study at home before you complete the 3&4. My question to you is - why not wait until next year? Out of curiosity, of course. It's not common for schools to let kids to do 1&2 Japanese in Year 10 (I was an exception, but again, not common at all).

I think to study the basics of Japanese 1&2 is achievable, but all of it? I don't think so, but if you'd like to start here's my advice:

TIPS:

• Do learn half of the kanji from recognition, but learn how to write maybe 50 of them. This will be probably the easiest of them all to do, you can easily search up "vce japanese kanji" and find a pdf then print it out and practice writing. Remember that for certain ones you'll just need to be able to recognise it rather than write from memory.
• Along with kanji, you can learn vocabulary at the same time. Learning vocab and kanji at the same time is a very good thing - vocab should be prioritised over kanji.
• Grammar is pretty important, as are learning how to use particles right. I recommend writing a Japanese journal or something of the sort to help you with using your grammar.
• Speaking. Speaking is extremely important in 3&4, you do an oral exam which counts to 25% of the study score. You need to know how to be able to converse about your personal life, the world around you and a specific topic. From early on, practice having conversations and prepare two sentence answers about questions you'd typically ask when first meeting someone (e.g. "What subjects do you study?" "How many members are there in your family?"), etc.
• Listening can be practiced directly on the VCAA website, I'd say they do a lot more listening in VCE than they would have previously.

Good luck with your studying journey!

hey I was thinking of doing 1&2 Jap as well. I was hoping if you could give me an insight to how it is. So firstly, would you say it’s a content heavy subject? (I’m guessing it is cos I mean, its a whole new language)
How difficult would you say it is?
And last tips?

justaperson_ hey!! I do Japanese 1&2 as well.

“would you say it’s a content heavy subject?”
I think it entirely depends on your teacher, and how much knowledge you initially have. For me personally, I already had extensive Japanese knowledge before starting 1&2, so that’s definitely made it a bit easier for me.

However, my teacher does enjoy pushing us to our limit. She’s had us learn basically all of the grammar and vocab all the way to unit 4, and it came to a point where I had a vocab or grammar test every day. Not all teachers are like this however, so don’t worry about that.

If you keep up with your work (unlike me) you’ll avoid feeling overwhelmed with all the new words and grammar patterns, and that’ll make it a bit more leisurely.

“How difficult would you say it is?”
Again, it depends on how much prior knowledge you have. In VCE Japanese there are 4 main components: reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

In my opinion, reading is the easiest. Comprehension has always been a strong suit of mine in English, so it seems it translated to Japanese as well. I’m also fairly decent at writing, so I don’t consider that hard either.

Listening and speaking on the other hand… I abhor. People will be different obviously, but I really do struggle with these (especially listening) so I think it’s good to identify your weaknesses quite early on so you can focus on them.

“And last tips?”
Practice. I can’t stress this enough, you can’t expect to get better at a language if you don’t apply it into your daily life. My biggest regret for unit 1&2 is that I barely practiced, and now I’m left catching up on the things I could’ve perfected earlier in the year.

Expose yourself to Japanese culture. I’m a huge weeb, I’ve been watching anime and reading manga since I learned to read and it’s the main thing that motivates me to learn this language and about its culture. Find something that interests you about Japan, and even when stuff gets stressful or hard, you’ll still have the will to keep going.

And if I had to tell you to focus on learning specific things: it’d be grammar and vocab. Kanji makes you seem smart, but the truth is you can get away with not using kanji or end up only losing a bit of marks. There’s no use showing that you can write 鬱 if your essay doesn’t make any sense. And you can’t even show kanji in an oral setting so…

I hope your time learning Japanese goes well! I think it really is one of the most useful subjects you could do. You might never touch maths methods work ever again, or even think about biology. But being able to speak a whole other language is something that stays for life.

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