ラベル Motivational の投稿を表示しています。 すべての投稿を表示
ラベル Motivational の投稿を表示しています。 すべての投稿を表示

My steps to live and work in Japan

Well as some of you may know one of my largest goals in life is to live and work in Japan and no matter how hard this will be I intend to make it. So today I thought I would talk a little about what my plans are and how I intend to reach my goals of living and working in Japan.

Satellite image of Japan in May 2003. :The isl...


I have nothing really special don't have a degree, haven't got much money and don't work in company that has a Japan division. First of all I've had to look at the degree front contrary to popular belief you don't need a degree to obtain a working visa in Japan, 10 years of experience in a specific field will also allow you to obtain a visa, this has set the first part of my goal I want to set off for Japan when I'm 28 at this time I will have 10 years experience in IT which comes under the working visa 'Engineering'. Although there is no denying that a degree would make life much easier for finding a job and the worst case scenario becoming an English teach, which I will talk about possible plans for me to obtain a degree before I set off to Japan in a later post.

Japanese Visa


Next up is another large obstacle 'money' my plan is when I reach the ripe old age of 28 that I will have enough cash saved to live in Japan without work for up to a year on a working holiday visa this should allow me enough time to hopefully find a job. To do this I've worked out that I need around 10k preferably more to live comfortably for many months until I find work this has to take into account there will be 2 mouths to feed as my wife will be with me. I started saving for this earlier this year and if I keep going at the rate I am now I should at least reach my goal of 10k

2000 Yen banknote with Shureimon.


Other than these 2 main obstacles I just need to keep increasing my knowledge in many work related areas, my Japanese and people networking as any one of these can give you opportunities in life that you may otherwise never have.

As long as we all have dreams and ambitions we should realize that we can reach any of our goals in life if we try hard enough but we all need to think what can we be doing 'now!' not later but now as we all only have a finite amount of time.

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11:47 | Category: , , , | 1 comments

language learning myths

Recently I've been thinking back to before I really started learning Japanese to a time when I thought that to learn a language you needed to be really smart or have it forced down your throat from a young age and also that other huge myth that a large amount of people (maybe the majority) still believe that you need to live in the country of the target language to reach any sort of fluency which i now know to be completly false and so does a growing number of language learners just checkout some more of the blogs on my blog list for some good examples.


Why you 'DON'T' need to live in the country of your target language to be fluent you have so much more resources at your disposal these day if you think the advantage to another country is that you will be surrounded by people talking in L2 then just get some headphones and audio and have this playing in your ear its exactly the same if you think "oh well there is newspapers and tv etc" erm well you can find all these on the internet for free so in this day and age there is no excuse for the 'you have to be living in the country' tiss a complete myth.

The old teachers and classes myth another potential if not possible harmfull waste of time is taking a course in the language some people may argue that you need somebody to explain things to you or that they learn better when somebody is telling them directly what to do. The only issue is that half the time the teacher wants you to feel good about yourself so they will only teach you how to say things whether you can understand the response is another story also if your learning something like Japanese you probably wont even start learning the Kanji for atleast a year and even then only a few as there is a misconception that the Kanji are extremly difficulty which is false really if you want to obtain fluency you need to be learning the Kanji from day one I recommend like so many others that you get a hold of Remembering the Kanji by James W. Heisig and you can learn all the 2046 jouyou Kanji in a few months.

Also in a lot of cases people who take classes will tend to go slower at learning the language unless they learn a lot in there own time put it this way the person who self studys everyday of the week x amount of time will be much further ahead than somebody who only does 1-2 days a week of classes and for the people that say they learn better when somebody is telling them are you sure that its not just a motivational thing? As when in a class your forced to listen/learn but at home its easy to be distracted by the next show on TV unless you keep motivated

So really there is no excuse anymore for not learning a language you have a great interest in as long as your motivated don't get me wrong it will still take time but thats only down to how much time you can spend learning each day if you fit something from the language into your day to day life each and every day and still keep up your interest and thirst for more knowledge you will learn in no time. You have all the tools you need on the 'internet' get yourself an SRS (I use anki) so you never forget anything again and will speed up the process immensley even if you stop studying new things for weeks you won't forget anything you've learned so far as long as you keep up with your daily reps.

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8:43 | Category: , , , | 1 comments