I just set up an appointment with my study abroad office on wednesday. I recently heard that an acquaintance of mine is currently in Japan, and he had paid a japanese student to tutor him for a few months before he left.
I can’t find anyone I know who has been to Turkey, but the university does in fact have a program to travel there.
It stands for Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme. That’s how I got here originally.
I didn’t come here as an exchange student, so I can’t speak to that part, but I can tell you that, while you probably won’t absolutely need to speak the language, it will help immensely. You will be missing out on tons of things if you don’t at least try to learn. You’ll also be contributing to the stereotype of the Arrogant American, who doesn’t even bother to learn anything about the country he chose to live in, even if that residency is supposed to be temporary.
One of my most memorable moments of disillusionment was when I visited Okinawa. People were overjoyed that I spoke Japanese. They said that most of the customers they get are military guys and while some of them are stationed there for years, few of them even speak enough Japanese to say polite words like “please” and “thank you.” You wouldn’t believe how much some people’s faces lit up when they heard me speak to them in Japanese instead of English. Make the effort to learn; it pays off big-time.
If you’re in a major city in Japan there will be lots of people who want to practice their English and you’ll probably never be short of those kinds of “friends” while you’re here. I put that in quotes because those of us who have been here for a while call those people Gaijin Groupies or Gaijin Collectors. Gaijin means literally “outside person,” or foreigner. These kind of people tend to think you’re interesting only as long as your Japanese sucks and stop hanging out with you when you stop speaking English a majority of the time. If you only hang out with them you’re missing a whole world of interesting people. Sure, you won’t have to speak Japanese, but you won’t get to speak Japanese either.
If you’re still wavering on deciding to study abroad, I definitely think you should do it. I would have given my left testic. . . well maybe not that much, but I really, really wish I’d taken the chance to do something like that when I was still in school. While I did end up coming here directly after school, it is an entirely different experience from being here as a student. One of my friends, who I met in Japan, did a year of study in Japan and came back on the JET Programme after he graduated. He said that he vastly prefers the time he was here as a student.
I have to disagree on a couple of points. Japanese is not grammatically difficult to learn, and it’s very easy to speak because they have relatively fewer sounds than English does; however the vocabulary will be more foreign than European languages. Also, you can get dictionaries in both directions (Eng.-Japanese and vice versa) that are printed in Romaji (Roman letters). The Japanese-English dictionary I had also had printed Japanese, so that if there were multiple choices for the same-sounding word, I could show them and they could point out the right one.
I spent a year in Japan in a college exchange program and in a home-stay environment. The classes were in English, but we were required to take Japanese language as well. My Japanese family spoke no English. I had taken two years of college Japanese, but when I got there I found out how pitifully inadequate that was. So I walked around with a dictionary for the vocabulary (the hardest part for me) and managed to figure out a lot of the rest. I used to practice reading all the ads on the subway or train when I was commuting, which seemed to help my reading comprehension.
So I think wherever you go it will be a lot easier to get along and a lot more interesting if you can learn some of the language before you go, and by all means study it seriously when you are there.