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I am currently studying Japanese at a community college. I love it so far. I can't take Japanese 4 (the last course level) until next spring semester, so for now, I can only take Intermediate Japanese Conversation. We use the Genki textbook (and Chikako Shinagawa, one of the authors, used to teach at my city's university before she taught at UCSB), and I love it so far. The lessons are structured out neatly and it teaches verb conjugations in a way that's easy for beginners to understand. Only thing I don't like about it is that they shove some things into expression notes (which I rarely pay attention to). All my Japanese professors were Japanese.

I graduated from high school about a month ago and recently attended the freshmen orientation at the school I'll be going to this August. Students who had taken at least 2 years of a foreign language in high school were required to take a placement test in that language to determine which level class to be admitted to. Tests were available for your basics like Spanish, French, and German, but Chinese and Arabic were also available. Japanese was not on this list.

I took four difficult years of Japanese in high school. I'm proud that I stuck with it. Now, I find out that if I want to continue to take Japanese in college, I'll have to start at the basic elementary level. All because they don't have a placement test for it.

I'm kind of crushed right now. I mean I'm not that good at it, but I felt that having four years of it under my belt might mean that I'd continue with it. I don't want to take the introductory course because I feel like it would be a waste of time, money, and energy...things I'll need to survive college. It would be an easy class..but I like challenging myself (heck, that's why I took Japanese!)

So, at this point I'm not sure what will happen. (And besides..the Japanese program at the university doesn't look all that great.) Anyway..I don't want to give it up, but sometimes you gotta make sacrifices.

I will be studying japanese at university this year.
I'm really excited. I hear that the language program at my college is really good.

you will have to tell me about your language program when you start ^^
i am from iowa and we dont have any japanese classes that teach japanese for college D:<

I'm in my third semester of studying Japanese in college. Last year I was at a different school and I had an American teacher who used the Genki (げんき) program and books. I liked it alright but I feel that my new sensei who is actually Japanese does a much better job with instruction and planning - plus she can offer real life experience as a Japanese native. We use Yookoso (よおこそ) here which is supposedly not as good as Genki but to be honest since the teacher's better I'm enjoying it more. I personally have no issues with the Yookoso textbook - it's fluid, comprehensive, efficient and it employs as much hiragana, katakana, and kanji in the text as possible. Because the quality of the instruction is more suitable to me now at my new school, Webster University, I'm loving the experience of learning Japanese like never before, and I'm progressing quite quickly imo.

This is my 3rd year of taking Japanese at Cleveland State University. The classes can be really intense sometimes because we move at a fast pace and do a massive amount of homework, but we have an amazing teacher and you get alot out of the classes. Unfortunatly we only 'officially' have first year and second year offered (my third year class is basically private lessons offered by our sensei) but we're trying to push the department for a third and fouth year, so it may change in the future. we use the Genki books for the 1st and 2nd year, and 3rd year we use 'an integrated approach to intermediate Japanese' by the Japan Times.