I took JAPN 301, Intermediate to Advanced Japanese I, in the fall semester of my freshman year. Since I took 4 years of Japanese in high school, I took a placement test and was placed in JAPN 301 as my first ODU Japanese course. At the start of the semester, I didn’t feel very confident since it had been a couple of months since my last course. Also, it felt like I learned different things than what was most likely taught in the previous ODU courses. There wasn’t a big gap in the material, but it still took a couple of weeks to get accustomed to the material and workload.

While there were some patterns and forms I had learned before the class, I feel like I still learned and improved my Japanese with the class. For example, I had learned 「V-たり」and the potential form in high school, but it was helpful to refresh myself on the material. Compared to my high school courses, JAPN 301 helped me improve my conversational Japanese a lot. In my high school course, we talked in Japanese, but we didn’t have a lot of normal conversations in Japanese. In JAPN 301, we participated in Virtual Learning Tables (VLTs), where we participated in a Zoom meeting with a student from Osaka Metropolitan University and had a 30-minute conversation with them, 15 minutes in Japanese and 15 minutes in English. Each VLT session had a topic to start a conversation with, such as traveling or school rules. Going into my first VLT, I was very nervous since I wasn’t confident in my conversational Japanese, but it was very enjoyable and helpful talking with a native speaker. It was difficult to think of things to say or questions to ask at times, but I can confidently say that I got better at speaking in Japanese through VLT. For each VLT, I wrote a report describing what my partner and I talked about, and what I felt like I could’ve improved upon. This allowed me to reflect on what I could improve upon in general or for my next VLT.

For the homework side of the class, it wasn’t overwhelming, but it helped me to stay confident in Japanese and remember the forms and patterns. There were usually 2 relatively short assignments per class, such as answering questions or watching a video and answering questions based on it. Since there were many shorter assignments every week, I was getting a lot of practice to make sure my Japanese was constantly improving.