JLPT N2 + Exchange

Community-Created Courses Japanese
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Hey guys, another update. i also finally updated my exchange blog, which you can read in English here.

I’ve now been on exchange/lived in japan for 8 months, my Japanese is JLPT N1 but still with enough wiggle room that if I have a particularly bad day I might not pass the actual test. The original plan of getting my Bachelor’s degree in January is completely screwed due to the difficulty of the thesis writing course (only 1 in 5 total students are passing, and literally every time I turn in a draft I’m told to both entirely rewrite my paper and that even my thesis idea won’t work) so I’ll go for a 2-year Associate’s instead, which I can graduate with in January. I already have a 2-year Associate’s from the USA, with which I’ve started applying for English teaching jobs all over Japan starting a couple weeks ago, using “Gaijinpot” mostly (because JAPANESE job ads aren’t expecting foreigners to read them they don’t mention stuff like what your Japanese level has to be or if they can sponsor a work VISA).

The first time I applied to 5-6 jobs, for most of them writing in English since the ads were in English; got an interview from one in Sendai 2 days later (where I had written in Japanese) and got a “we already hired someone” one from another job a couple days after that; the others never replied. The place I got an interview at seemed to really like me because I spoke Japanese among other things, but they didn’t contact me on Friday like they said they would so tonight I applied for 11 more jobs, writing all of it in Japanese though I’m using an English site.

My schedule right now is:
• July: JLPT N1 test; exchange year ends
• September: the contract for my apartment ends, so i need to get a new place to stay before then
• January: my student VISA expires and I have to leave japan, if I haven’t found a full-time job by then

I’m reading in Japanese 2-3 hours a day, though I was reading novels every day for a while my Bachelor’s thesis stuff messed that routine up and now I’ve gone back to my previous schedule of “light” reading (=using manga apps right before bed). I’m also usually watching 30-60 minutes of anime a day, whether with Japanese subs or entirely unsubbed. Still writing on Twitter every day, sending Emails or messages on LINE in Japanese to friends etc once a day or so, still going to Esperanto club and all that. Now I’ve been doing a lot of “read a text in English/Japanese and orally translate it” whether due to school (ex. translating an English text on the spot for what American high schools are like, for International Culture class, since it was a homework assignment but my classmates didn’t understand it) or it just being stuff like my wife wanting to know what a mangaka’s saying on their Twitter so I translate that to English. My Japanese isn’t perfect but at least it’s good enough to where I can even do that kind of stuff without any huge problems or taking a lot of time.

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Great to hear you went from around N2 when you arrived to now about to pass N1! One reads plenty of stories about people dropping off after N2 and not being able to bridge the gap for years.

Any good novels you’d recommend? Whether you really enjoyed their content or found them to be great in terms of easy to understand. Also, it sounds like you no longer use Memrise?

Also, I think I’ve mentioned this to you before, but you may try applying to the IUC.

https://www.iucjapan.org/index_e.html

I know they do a good job of providing funding for tuition (but not room + board). Many, many people involved in Japanese politics/professorship/translating/business are alumni.

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Yeah! My goal for my whole life has been to get as good as a native speaker in Japanese, and aside from that I just love Japanese literature and media (relatively speaking), so I’ll keep studying and surpass N1 soon enough ; D

Thanks for that link, it looks like I’m at about the right level to take their courses but it claims you won’t have time to work alongside your studies which means… I can’t go there because I wouldn’t be able to afford to live haha! I’m still using Memrise but not checking the forums (aside from, occasionally, this thread) and I don’t add words nearly as often as I used to. This is mostly due to me not having basically any time - I’ve spent the entire semester writing and rewriting my BA thesis proposal about five times now, now yet again I have to entirely rewrite it and rethink of my topic… I also had a total of a 2-hour commute to my part-time job (where I’d work for 1-2 hours) on most days but I’ve solved that problem now.

So far, as reading material for adults, I really recommend bad romance light novels (in my case, bad BL novels), because they’re relatively predictable (in the case of BL, usually extremely predictable), the vocabulary repeats itself constantly (“embarrassed! kiss! confession! workmates! gay!” etc), and it probably only focuses on 2-3 characters (as opposed to, say, sci-fi which might have 20) with few changes in setting or in speaking style between the characters. You can get a lot of different vocabulary and grammar from reading manga, but it means you really have to read a LOT of manga and ideally, in a LOT of different genres. For example, I recently came across a BL manga (男やもめも花は咲く) that uses a relatively large amount of words I haven’t seen in like any other manga, let alone other BL manga… but I found this by total chance. Anyway, I think that if you can manage to read manga, you can also manage to read a bad romance novel.

As for actual titles… I’ve just been trying things at random. One I thought was really easy to read was 人魚姫のハイヒール, about a guy who ends up crossdressing because the co-worker he likes says he liked seeing it. The plot and setting are really typical for BL and I thought the narration was usually easy to follow, and there weren’t so many words per page I didn’t know (a lot of what WAS unknown, I ended up learning via immersion by the end of the book, ex. the word for “to have a crush on someone”). But this is also a genre I just happen to read a lot of in manga form, so maybe if it weren’t it wouldn’t be so easy. I’ve also tried reading stuff like the novel versions of Fight Club, Devilman, Cyber City OEDO 808 and Harry Potter, but I actually think all of those are somewhat harder than 人魚姫のハイヒール, probably because they’re all fantasy/sci-fi/action. I checked out Eragon at the used bookstore and from what little I saw that might be easy, but there appear to be two versions (one huge one like the original English and one pocketbook version), I don’t know if the pocketbook one is a different translation or something.

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Thank you for all the titles :champagne:

By the way, if it’s not too personal, can I ask why you want to live in Japan rather than Sweden? I know the Happiness Index has the latter in #9, whereas Japan ranks #54.

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It’s not too personal (in my opinion) at all! I’ll try to summarize it:

  1. I like the look/sound of the Japanese language, anime, manga, traditional Japanese stuff and “weird” stuff in general.
  2. In Japan there’s all kinds of jobs and part-time jobs; in Sweden there’s (or, there haven’t been for 6 years and counting) not any. Not even the unemployment office could help me in Sweden.
  3. In Japan people really look out for you no matter what you’re doing. Whether you’re just working your normal job, or doing schoolwork, or handicapped, or a foreigner who’s having trouble or something. If you ay you have a problem, Japanese people will actually try to figure out how it can be solved. In Sweden you’re basically left completely alone, you’re supposed to figure out how to do everything yourself, people don’t really help you etc.
  4. There’s a lot of stuff to DO and SEE in Japan even if you have no interest in “Japan” itself. Karaoke, zoos, themed restaurants, themed hotels, festivals, whatever, and it’s for the most part all really accessible. In Sweden there’s kinda… nothing. Stuff exists, but it’s not advertised and it’s really tiny and boring. Basically imagine a small town in the middle of the forest and that’s Sweden (and then make the price of everything you buy 3x higher than the price in Japan).
  5. Japan is customized to YOUR life. You can have a super tiny, super cheap apartment if that’s what you want/need. You can read any genre of book imaginable and then go to a café meetup for it. You can go to the grocery store at 2 am. In Sweden you’re sort of stuck in the system, because there’s so few people there aren’t nearly as many choices. No tiny apartment, no 24-hour convenience store etc.

Sweden is good for if you’re going to university, if you want to raise a kid, if your dream is to be a farmer in the middle of nowhere, or if you want to be a doctor. After that, I don’t really know why Sweden is seen as better than Japan yet. The Japanese healthcare system is a lot more efficient (at least, to me as an outsider) than Sweden’s for example. Sweden’s also slipping in education standards, home life standards and the population’s health standards (as in, now Swedes too are making instant microwave chocolate cakes, putting more pressure on kids by grading them with A through F, etc).

Finally, I hate Americanization (and Britishification etc). Most of what comes out of it tends to ruin a country/culture/language. I hate that when I’m in Sweden, half of what I hear/see is actually more or less fluent English, and everyone’s trying to copy America and stuff (generally speaking: I didn’t move abroad just to live in a doppleganger of my home country). Social values etc change when you get outside influence… and not always for the better. I’m not saying that Japan has the best values and whatnot either, but it’s pretty refreshing to live in a country where they definitely see themselves as totally unrelated to everything going on on the other continents and thus don’t feel as compelled to follow those trends. Well gotta go to the clinic now so I can’t rewrite this to make it any clearer, sorry!

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hi guys, another update. i’ve been job-hunting since second semester started in april, finally found a start-up english teaching school and talked to a worker there — from him i got the advice to get the 120-hour (or more) TEFL online. it cost around $200 USD, on sale from i-to-i, and counts as a “Teaching English as a Foreign Language License/Certificate” (which either makes your resume/CV look better or is a literal job qualification). despite being “120 hours” I actually completed it in 7 hours; the final exam claims it’ll take 3 hours but it took 35 minutes for me. the same guy asked his english-teaching friends and gathered links to other english-teaching schools i could try applying to, i’m gonna see someone from one of those tomorrow.

this week i discovered that taiwan is one of the only “safe” countries where you can get english-teaching jobs while only having a 2-year (AA) degree and a 120-hour TEFL certificate (instead of a 4-year BA), so i started applying for jobs in taiwan. and i started learning mandarin (just in case, though it also helps my kanji comprehension a lot!) from “domino chinese” (i couldn’t find courses with the vocab from it on memrise by the way), which claims that after 22 hours of study you’ll be able to understand around 75% of mandarin. i’m now on 3 hours and am already able to pick out words i’ve learnt from what the chinese-speaking exchange students say to each other.

anyway, i’m having a really, really tough time with one of the teachers at my japanese school. starting about 2 months ago (since i told her i was job-hunting) she’s begun completely misunderstanding and being delusional about basically everything i say. 3-4 times now she’s been saying to me/assuming that i’m going to:

• stay in japan illegally after my VISA expires
• work full-time illegally (either without a VISA, or on a student VISA)
• break my exchange contract and quit school early
• break my apartment lease/contract
• saying that my behaviour (ex. not saying sorry in the correct place or making a mistake in reading some rules) “won’t be tolerated in japanese society, or at a japanese company”
• that i shouldn’t attempt to go to a different university (than my current online swedish one) in order to finish my BA (that i can’t finish due to the professor being crazy - i’ll be “graduating” next semester with another AA instead)
• for every potential employer/company that gives me an interview, or contacts me in general, she’s told me i shouldn’t work for them

(note: all this is a total lie, of course. i’m not going to break any laws/contracts and i already told her that months ago the first time she assumed that i was planning on it. i’m doing perfectly fine in japanese society, have had 2 part-time jobs and have a ton of friends of all ages. any company that hires me will be used to hiring foreigners who just set foot in japan yesterday and who don’t speak any japanese at all. this teacher has literally no clue about stuff like what job ads for being an english teacher look like.)

she’s also started correcting every email i send her into keigo (super polite language), and if i even so much mention the fact, when speaking to a classmate, that ex. “oh that job sounds nice because you don’t have to use keigo” she goes “you do have to with your coworkers you know!!”. again she has no clue what she’s even talking about. i visited the place myself and they didn’t use keigo when talking to each other — even if they had used it, everyone is lenient on foreigners and the staff would’ve TAUGHT ME the keigo. i haven’t studied keigo in school by the way, which is why i don’t know it (though i can understand it, thanks to manga and anime). and none of my other teachers at this school have ever mentioned that i should use keigo to them or to any other teachers — not even the ones who aren’t used to teaching exchange students. they’re just happy i can say anything in japanese at all. it’s literally only this one teacher who cares about it in any way. in fact when i tried writing in keigo to the secretary she responded in english to avoid it!

by the way, i haven’t actually noticed the japanese students using keigo to the teachers — they just say the normal “desu/masu” very basic polite forms. the teachers themselves speak in keigo when they lecture but they don’t speak in keigo when talking to students directly!

this same teacher blew up at all the exchange students because we didn’t know (all 11 of us didn’t know) that japanese etiquette requires that before going home at the end of the trip you wait for the teachers and say “gokurou sama deshita”. instead the teachers disappeared without saying anything so we all just left. she also teaches our class like we’re kindergarteners (every class is a “game” or something that no one cares about playing because we’re all 18-30 years old), i can’t even remember what we’ve learnt in her class because it’s so little compared to what the others teach us. this same teacher, on another field trip, picked a restaurant where 4 out of 11 people literally could only eat rice, oranges and carrots due to all the menu items having items they were allergic to (hint, i was one of them, fancy paying for a meal you can’t eat when right next door is a place you COULD’VE eaten at) — and this is AFTER she had recorded all of our allergies down well in advance for the trip! same teacher misremembered, and didn’t confirm with me or any of the other students who know me, my allergies when we visited another school.

same teacher yelled at me in front of other students for something that wasn’t really my fault, and with the classroom door open, and didn’t accept my apology no matter how many times i apologized. she doesn’t listen to what i’m saying even if i repeat it three times (such as “no, i couldn’t tell you sooner than this morning because THEY didn’t email ME with the info until this morning!” — she just keeps repeating “you should’ve told me earlier!”). the list goes on. and she thinks I’M rude?

oh and she’s constantly trying to get me to agree with her whenever she’s lecturing me, or when we’re on a field trip she’s like “wow this is so fun, RIGHT? too bad your wife couldn’t come with, RIGHT?”. keep dreaming — you don’t know anything about what my wife does or doesn’t like. i just say the common-courtesy “yes” in order to try and make her talk to me less. they’ve been doing stuff like taking us to wine-tasting events on a school trip, when some people have alcoholic parents and some people don’t drink for religious reasons, and they haven’t asked us exchange students ONCE what we actually want to do on the trip. we get basically no explanations about where we’re going, no free time, can’t even walk around the place we arrive at. one of the african guys has never seen the ocean and we were only about 10 minutes walking away from it — but they didn’t give us enough free time to be able to walk there and see it (so now i’m trying to plan a beach party for him myself)! oh and this teacher fakes being happy and calm during class but as soon as class gets out she’ll be pissed, then 5 minutes later when class starts again she’ll be perfectly “fine and happy” again.

i only have about one and a half months until my exchange year ends so i’m really glad all this bad stuff with her started NOW and not, say, in my second month here. but geeze. she’s by far the worst person i’ve met in japan in my whole time here (so far). and it’s not because she’s “japanese”, it’s because she’s crazy — people just like her exist in all countries, i had to live with various people just like her for many years in iceland and sweden. i talked with a research student who was an exchange student here 3 years ago, and apparently in the timespan of 3 years that teacher has become “like a different person”, on top of our exchange year being an abnormally nice, polite and well-mannered class compared to the other ones she’s seen at this same school : /

anyway, that’s where i’m at right now. if i can’t get hired in japan, it seems like taiwan is actually jumping to hire me so i’d go there for a few years while i attempt to finish my BA online (=waiting 2 years) or actually start over and get a BA in another subject (=3 years). i have to take different classes so i can get a different BA thesis supervisor if i want to actually get a BA in japanese, because my supervisor literally failed me on every draft, refused to correct my final draft, and banned me from contacting him for 1-2 months out of the semester. since finishing the japanese BA will take like 2 years anyway, if i study an entirely new subject for 3 years and get a BA in something totally different just to avoid that teacher/department, it’ll “solve” that problem. university in sweden is free so money isn’t an issue, it’s just time and a matter of finding out what degrees i can possibly get online in the first place.

the JLPT is next month, i’m taking N1 and it seems like i’ll pass as long as i don’t have one of those days where everything i know flies out my brain — which has been happening almost every day for the last 2 weeks due to stress from stuff like this teacher at my japanese school, finding out my swedish teacher wouldn’t even correct my BA thesis, etc. our last class trip is to go to kyoto, but i’m not going due to the class trips never being worth the money and due to how many problems we had on this last class trip — afterwards the teachers were just chewing us out for all kinds of things we were never told wasn’t allowed, such as sleeping on the long-distance bus or using our phones when someone was talking. hint: if a student is doing something bad, tell them while they’re doing it, not 14 hours later. i can just go to kyoto on my own, stay at a friend’s place and have a lot more (and probably cheaper) fun myself.

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hey guys, i’ll soon be leaving japan (sept 19th, it’s sept 7th now) so here’s another update. i have to leave my apartment sept 14th, will stay with an esperanto clubmate until the 19th when i take a direct flight from sendai to taipei (taiwan), the english school will meet me at the airport in taipei and take me to taoyuan where i’ll be working/living. i’ve started studying chinese via “domino chinese” and just this week my university chinese courses (taught by the same uni as my japanese courses have been, they’re all online classes) started - so far the chinese teachers are a lot nicer than, and the pace of the chinese classes is a lot slower than, in the japanese courses at the same school.

my japanese is now good enough that i can watch unsubbed movies on 105% to 135% speed, and i can read light novels without looking anything up (novels vary in difficulty of course though; right now i’m reading the Gintama light novels on a phone app). i can read at least 4 manga volumes a day (1 year ago it’d take me all day to read 1 volume!) and my reading is still better than my listening. there’s still kanji i don’t know, but i expect that’ll soon be remedied by studying chinese.

tomorrow i’ll have lunch with my “friendship family” one last time, then there’s my farewell party at esperanto club. i have to go online and register that i’m going to throw out large/special trash (2 mattresses that i was given by the esperanto club when i first came + 1 laptop) then go to the convenience store and buy special “tickets” to pay for throwing out said trash. i’m giving a futon (that i got from a fellow exchange student) and some bedding to an indonesian girl who’s moving in on sept 20th and contacted me over twitter; i have to contact the office of her apartment to see how to drop the stuff off and so on since she’ll arrive after i leave japan.

we managed to cancel our phone contracts with a lot of effort. we went to a physical shop for the phone company but you can only cancel your contract through calling their help center - we called the english one, which only seems to have one single staff member (from like indonesia), and managed to get them to understand that we’re not allowed to keep our bank account after we leave japan and got them to agree to email us our final bill immediately instead of waiting for october or sending it to a friend, and the phone service would be cancelled that same day. then we were supposed to pay the bill within 2 days and call them again after we’d paid it. so after paying the next day we went to the shop again to borrow their phone again to call, i tried doing it in japanese (customer service picked up immediately) only to realize i don’t know how to say words like “bill” in japanese so i switched to the english one… which didn’t pick up even after 40 minutes of waiting.

one of the shop staff saw our situation and called the japanese center asking if there was anything they could do, and they probably just told him to have us keep waiting, but after those 40 minutes i hung up and asked “if we try to explain the situation to you, can you call the japanese help center and explain it to them for us?”. i explained we’d already cancelled our account yesterday, and showed her a photo of the bill info and said we’d just paid this and were supposed to call to confirm it. she understood it all immediately and helped us out - we still had to say our names, phone numbers and security codes ourselves but she conveyed all other info to them for us. i understood all that she told them, i just couldn’t have formulated it myself, which was a bit frustrating emotionally.

(from what i read it’s illegal to keep a japanese bank account if you’re a foreigner moving overseas - BUT we can ask the bank and see if that’s true before closing it. japanese banks have no monthly fees, they just take money from you when you’re transferring money or paying bills instead.)

i got my JLPT results in the mail today, i failed the N1 (got 82 points, you need 100 out of 180 to pass). i’m not really surprized, because despite studying for it for a year at university, when it came time to actually take the test literally NONE of the grammar we had studied was on there, and as usual it was entirely geared towards the kind of japanese formal businessmen need and was unrelated to normal, real-life japanese or japanese for fiction (movies, novels, manga) etc. for example, there was essentially no katakana/english-borrowed words on the whole test, despite that in real life they’re in literally everything you read. the test was also geared towards people who’re fluent in chinese, and had various questions designed specifically to stump people who spoke chinese (but no such questions for people who spoke english).

the good thing is, if i had gotten a job in japan part of me getting hired would probably have ridden on me passing the test, but since i’ll be in taiwan that’s not the case and i’ll have at least another year to slowly study and pass a retake.

about all the BA thesis stuff from before: so at my swedish uni there’s 3 “academic essay-writing classes” (all for writing in ENGLISH, not japanese); 1 you write to get a 2-year associate’s degree in japanese (though it’s not advertised that that’s even possible), 1 to “prepare” you for writing your 3-year bachelor’s thesis (which literally teaches you nothing), and 1 to write your actual thesis (where the teachers basically don’t even contact you throughout the whole semester). it turns out, again despite not being advertised as it, that the one for the associate’s degree is the class that actually teaches you how to write the bachelor’s thesis, and the “thesis preparation class” is just a time-wasting formality.

so with any luck, the paper i write for the associate’s writing class can actually be used as my BA proposal draft, but even if it is, i still have to take a separate class in spring in order to have the same supervisor as the one who’s teaching the associate’s class in autumn. right now i’m thinking of writing about the apparent 3 uses of furigana (1. to show a word’s pronunciation, 2. to show a synonym of that same word - ex. “beverage” having the furigana of “drink”, and 3. to show the nuance of a word in context, ex. “me” having the furigana of “god”)

i’ve also written and self-published my first language textbook (and book in general), it’s in esperanto so almost no one here can read it but you can get an e-version here or the physical version here (i just got the proof in the mail so i have to update the physical version tonight to fix the errors i found but otherwise it’s purchasable). i’m now working on a “how to translate japanese” book that includes stuff like that furigana thing i just mentioned, gendered language, common phrases that people usually “stock translate” as something-or-other but that have better translations (such as “irasshaimase!” ALWAYS being translated as “welcome!” when in many cases it makes much more sense as simply “hello!”). i’m pulling a few usage examples from life in japan and various japanese example sentences from real-life texts, and covering stuff i didn’t see covered in the translation textbook i was forced to read for school, so hopefully it’ll be a pretty useful book.

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Long time no see guys! Basically I’m at JLPT N1 level now, have become a freelance translator (getting customers on Twitter) and am applying to manga translation companies to get some part-time translation work while I wait to finish my Bachelor’s and can then move back to Japan.

When doing an analysis of the translation mistakes in a VIZ manga, I found out the “professional translator” of it is actually only at N2 level, so I made a quick example portfolio and sent it off to all the manga companies I could find (that let you work online).

Anyway I’ll be back on Memrise now, because I’ll need to study the words / grammar I come across in translations and don’t know ;D

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Dear risgrynsgrot,

i just read through your journey and really felt the urge to let you know, how proud I think you should be of yourself (a little bit of a complicated sentence xD). Your learning-journey really doesn’t seem like a complete walk in the park and still you have been so persistent - I honestly think this is truly admirable.
On a personal note I found your story extremely encouraging, since I’m also aiming for (more or less) profound fluency in Japanese even though I have a handicap as well and need to do this on my own (for various reasons).
So I just wanted to let you know, that I’m cheering you on and hope you can achieve your goal one way or another (I’m phrasing it like that, because your past somehow showed, that a lot of things in life tend to happen differently from what we would expect - looking at certain teachers…:sweat_smile:). Keep up the good work!
Many greetings,
neko-chan :smile_cat:

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neko-chan, thank you!! it’s a really long thread, i’m surprised anyone’s still reading through it!

yeah, at this point i believe if life goes the way you want/expected you’re extremely lucky. as it is right now, i’ve studied japanese for almost 4 years and i’m about to get my AA in japanese but still won’t be able to get my BA (which is only supposed to take 3 years) until 3 semesters from now. they’ve also apparently changed the requirements and made it impossible for most people to go abroad to japan (you need N2 Japanese and have to go to the school for an in-person interview, but because it’s an online degree most people live nowhere near the school and some are even in foreign countries), says my lowerclassman. and, well, that teacher is apparently marking lowerclassmen’s homework that only got one single point wrong with “i GUESS you did an acceptable job”… >.>

since i still can’t find a job because i don’t have a bachelor’s yet, i’m still living in my abusive household with my in-laws (probably i mentioned this in the thread at some point), the student grant money i get for studying full-time doesn’t even cover groceries for me and my spouse. as it is i’m doing odd translation jobs for people, waiting to hear back from the translation test i took for a part-time job at a certain manga company, and i’ve started writing “slightly academic essays” off and on about various aspects of japanese that i either see people misteach or never talk about at all, that i’ll eventually self-publish. i also have a bunch of other projects i’m working on, like a textbook for ainu etc. which requires me to do a lot of translating from japanese. but since i’m in an abusive household my mental state isn’t so good and it’s hard to finish anything or even stay on the same project, compared to when i’m not living with these guys.

my japanese is now at the point where i can read normal (not highly technical) nonfiction that seems to be meant for high schoolers or adults without any problems at all, there’s only 1-2 words per page i don’t know on average. i tested this by getting some “memorization techniques” and “learn hanguel” etc books. i’ve been trying to read more novels, and made the decision to read through japanese translations of novels i’ve already read in english just to take off some of the worry about the plotpoints and stuff.

you can definitely do it! and i don’t know what kind of disability you have, but something as simple as changing the font type or size can really go a long way. i’m not dyslexic but right now i’ve replaced all latin fonts that appear in my web browser with one called “dyslexie” and found that my eyestrain has vastly disappeared, i’m now able to skim-read and read a lot faster than i ever could before with other fonts too. dyslexie’s really expensive but at times you can get it for free.

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I’m glad to read that you are still doing your best, although I’m sad to hear that your circumstances don’t seem to be the best at the moment (at least concerning the academic issues and your living environment). Of course I don’t know exactly how your situation is, but I think I can understand quite well just how much your motivation and work/ study force can suffer, if your mental state is not in its best shape (I have quite a long history with my anxiety disorder…). Although my disablity is quite different from yours (back problems with serious pain issues and so on), I clearly can’t study like I would like to because of these problems (even though one might think that these things aren’t as problematic to studying as yours - I always think that comparing these kinds of things is a little bit inappropiate), but as I try to carry on, it was really very encouraging to read your story. I feel that if you are fighting against a lot of problems, it’s sometimes really helpful if there is someone at least recognizing what you are up against and that you are doing your best, even if those people can’t directly help you. It’s probably just reassuring to know that you are not alone, thus I wanted to send you at least some kind words (even though they are hopelessly rough since English isn’t my mothertongue :sweat_smile:).
There is one other thing you mentioned, that seems quite interesting though: You said you did a list of translation mistakes in a VIZ manga and put them into a portfolio that you sent off to some manga companies, which let you work online. During my studies, where I now started trying to read some real novels (although geared at a teenager/ young adults audience, I guess) while comparing them to their translated versions I also found a couple of mistakes in some of them (or at least I think so; nothing big yet, I’m sure your Japanese is way better than mine and so you are probably able to spot a lot more, but still it were things, I found awfully annoying) and my spouse told me to do the exact same thing you did, but I thought it would be kind of rude and couldn’t bring myself to do it (LOL) - so I was interested in their reaction (maybe I should really consider doing something similar?).
And may I ask which manga companies with online working options you found? I was wondering if those are the big ones or rather small ones, if it’s most of them or rather a minority, since I didn’t expect them to let you work like that at all (I can’t really explain why though, maybe this is a rather stupid thought). Considering my physical condition and my home town being completely out in the sticks, it would be really great, if a considerable number of companies would work that way, since I imagine, that in this case this could be true for the German speaking area as well and if I ever get confident enough in my Japanese (in the far future…), that seems to me like a really interesting working option. Although once again I must admit that your course of actions is already quite encouraging because you proofed that it is possible to get translation jobs online anyways.
And if I’m not already being way too nosy it would also be very interesting what kind of translation test they wanted you to take - just a simple translation of a manga or was it a novel or something completly different?
I’m really sorry if I’m being rude, but to be honest, you are somehow walking a path that I always wanted to try walking on, while I was afraid it was utterly impossible because it doesn’t even exist in the first place, so I can’t help being totally curious. :sweat_smile:
Well, now I too put a rather long text to this already quite long thread, so you can see, you are not alone, but I would be glad if it wasn’t the last text in here LOL
In any case, I wish you the best and a lot of energy to fight all those obstacles on your learning journey.
P.S.: I completely forgot to say a big THANK YOU in my first text for all the useful learning advices (apps, online sites, books…)! :smile_cat:

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You’re welcome, and thanks for commenting! I really hope I can inspire more people. As a kid I never realized you can study Japanese on your own or anything like that, and in the past I failed university because I didn’t know how to study languages (I was studying Icelandic), so I really regret those things and hope I can in some way help other people not make my same mistaeks.

I made a page earlier about it for my lowerclassman, here it is. It has most of the manga companies I found that actually hire people and aren’t “family businesses”. Of course the page is only from my own experience and I’m not very experienced but I hope it helps. Elsewhere on my site you can find some pages that might have more help for Japanese for you, though I never really update the site because it’s difficult to do so with the text editor thing they use (it lags and the save buttons get cut off).

I didn’t send in the mistakes to the company since I felt it would be too rude, but in the end VIZ never replied to me anyway so I’ll just do it next time lol. No risk no reward! The company that got back to me was a different one (only one out of the 5 or so I contacted replied).

Yeah it’s a big shame. If I had money I would have already made my own manga translation company, since alongside translating my own favorite manga I want to translate to minority languages and help save those languages. But I’ll just have to wait a long time before I can get that money.

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WOW, thank you so much - once again! This seems to be extremly helpful, I will have to go through it in detail later on, but I wanted to thank you first.
It’s really funny how much similarities there seem to be in our language learning histories and I’m glad I’m not the only person thinking in this manner :sweat_smile: After my time at the university I was really disenchanted with how things worked there - it all seemed so hollow and rather useless to me if you wanted to use your own brain (just following static rules for writing papers, just repeating what others already repeated…), that I’m really glad, that studying on your own is an option, at least more or less for some things, even though there might be a lot/ some drawbacks if you don’t have a degree to show off - but at least we have the JLPT! :slightly_smiling_face:
And although I have been reading manga for so many years and it always seemed like the big-dream-goal to be translating those int the remote future I never thought about how those companies actually came to life - maybe because here in the German speaking area there only seem to be a handful which are connected to big book companies.
Do you have a certain plan/ idea how much money one would need to start off such a company or how doing this could be best accomplished?

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As we speak I’m editing a mini paper I just wrote for school on furigana in manga, to self-publish it later after the semester’s over (the English version anyway — I can publish other-language versions without waiting)!

I don’t know. The thing is, even if you do everything (translation, cleaning, online publishing) solo, I haven’t been able to find actual info on how much it costs to buy manga translation licenses. I currently don’t even have enough money to pay for groceries each month (student grant money is only about 350 Euros per month, with nothing in summer, and I pay for two people) so unless the license is free I can’t afford it (haha) but once I get a normal job and save up some money I’m going to contact a company that “gets licenses for you” and ask them about certain indie manga I enjoy.