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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