This is a follow up to my Sophia FAQ which I posted in January. Now that I have had a few weeks doing Advanced Japanese 1, I feel like I can shed some light on that too.
First off, it’s a heck of a lot better. Much more focus on speaking and listening, and the content of the textbook is now challenging because it’s advanced Japanese, not challenging because it’s mind numbingly boring. There are four 90 minute classes a week, two of which are spent covering reading and grammar, looking mostly at newspaper reports and so on. The other two are spent watching TV content, having discussions, giving speeches and so on.
Again it’s not what I would call ‘on the street’ Japanese practice, but I think you get to practice that… well on the real street. There’s still a lot of stuff to memorize, although it’s not quite as much as intermediate. I think you’re simply supposed to learn everything that comes up in the content that you didn’t know before. It’s working for me, anyway.
Overall I would say it is a considerable improvement from the intermediate Japanese class, to the point that I would recommend it to most JLPT2+ students. At this point you really can just memorize your way up to JLPT1, but by taking this class I think you might be able to round out some speaking/listening skills quite nicely, too.
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You said you like advanced better than the intermediate class, what’s the main difference?
I always get confused between intermediate/ upper intermediate/ advanced etc. At the moment I just find that the more I learn the more I realise I don’t know!
Amanda: Intermediate was around JLPT2, this is now a JLPT1 class. Also there’s a lot less focus on structural grammar, and more on colloquial usage.