Most students doing Japanese at school are only exposed to Japanese through their textbook at school. While using the textbook is better than using nothing, it is not enough to become proficient at Japanese, or score very well in the exam. While textbooks are good for getting a grip on the basic grammar (which is very important), after that it’s mainly vocabulary and set phrases, most of which you won’t in a textbook, particularly a VCE textbook.

Well, where is can I get exposed to Japanese you ask? The easiest way to think about this is to think about how you get exposed to English in your daily life. You most likely speak English to someone during a typical day, so one way to get exposed is to speak to a Japanese person. You might procrastinate by reading something online – instead you could read something in Japanese. Maybe you watch English TV Shows – you could watch a Japanese drama or anime instead. Some people might spend 5 hours a day on Facebook – try and spend 5 hours on Facebook set to Japanese instead. With this mindset it’s not that hard to find ways to get exposed to Japanese as much as possible.

In the next post I’ll go into more detail for ways you could get exposed to Japanese. But the last post before this was a year ago, so I can’t promise anything XP. I just want to keep this post short so I can keep motivated to write stuff.