rtackhooper -
Oh, it’s wonderful that you’re going to get to go - and I hope you have an amazing trip! My family can’t wait to go back, after having such an incredible experience.
I would say I got good value out of my italki lessons, but I think I had unrealistic expectations at the very beginning. I had been self-studying for about six months before I signed up, so I had a pretty firm grasp on rudimentary N5 grammar. I had also listened to a fair amount of spoken japanese with very beginner-level podcasts, so I had a sense of how the language should be spoken. I thought I would be heading towards some basic conversational skills, like I had done when learning Spanish.
And it helped somewhat. My italki sessions got me a little more comfortable with the general concept of spoken Japanese and some practice listening to it. An hour per week to speak the language out loud and listen to an instructor gave me much more facility with exceptionally simple phrases, both listening and producing. I felt it was very worthwhile. I wouldn’t have done more, just because I didn’t really have the time or budget that I wanted to allocate to that. I absolutely valued what I got. And many times during the trip I was able to use my broken Japanese, speaking and listening, to get us out of jams when no one spoke English.
But Japanese is hard. Hard for everyone, and (apparently) especially hard for English speakers. I was able to make myself somewhat understood in very limited circumstances, but anything approaching the types of sentences a five year old could make was beyond me. Partially that’s because I simply couldn’t get my head around SOV vs. SVO sentence structure, but also because it’s just so hard to do output in real time if you’re translating. Same with listening to native speakers talking normally, rather than slowing down a bit and using only the basic vocabulary and sentence structure in order to be understandable.
So where I ended up was: enough Japanese to have fun practicing with people like cab drivers and waitresses who were willing to “play along” with having a little chat with the American. But not enough Japanese to have a “real” conversation with folks, even at a basic level. I could communicate with the konbini clerks about how to pay or where the drinks were, but if I got in a cab with a driver who didn’t speak english I didn’t have enough japanese to explain to them how to get to my hotel.
TL;DR - it was worthwhile because I plan to continue learning Japanese. I did not get enough speaking facility with 1 hour a week over 6 months to have much in the way of substantive conversation, but could do idle chat with cabbies and use broken sentences to get out of a confusing situation at time.
One piece of advice I got that I wish I had earlier: MASTER KATAKANA. More than anything else, I wish I had really drilled down on learning Katakana to the point where I could sight-read it. There’s so much Katakana that’s useful to be able to read, and so much of it is English loanwords (or an approximation of it), that I really wish I didn’t have to sort of sound it out in my head.
