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isnt it true that you have to know japanese to go to college over there?

I would love to do this, but i go to a community college in michigan, im sad, but good luck and make sure u tell us all how much fun u have there.

You don't really have to know Japanese if you go to.. say... Tokyo. I've been studying Japanese for like, 6 years (hs included) and I'm a double major in it though, so.. uh.. i have some prior interest. xd

This particular program I applied for required either a previous semester or year of study, I don't remember exactly.. you did have to know both alphabets and some very basic kanji, plus extremely basic wa-ga-desu sentences, stuff like that, but nothing extreme. It's an "Intensive Language Program", whatever that means, so you take 8 credits of Japanese a semester (about twice-three times as much as the average college course).

If you're going to Japan on a "cultural studies" program though, you can take courses in English and just some basic Japanese courses, for which there is no prior language requirement. I hear that courses taught in English in Japan tend to be kind of a joke though, since the schools force the professors to teach in english when they're really not interested in doing so and don't speak very good english anyway sweatdrop

eek your friend is going to Nanzan? wow, what a small world, that's intense xd

I would like to study abroad sometime when I college. I just hope I will understand subject material. I'd rather learn complicated material in English. (Pre-med? biggrin )

Namari, do professors in Japan have to speak in English? Or do they speak in Japanese by "default" and only speak in English for gaijin classes? (Gaijin means "foreigner, right?)

Ah, but I need to finish up my Spanish, at least finishing up Spanish 3 before taking Japanese. Since Japanese is "useless" where I live, when Spanish isn't. -_-

I think it depends on the school you go to in Japan, how far along you are in the language, and the program you do. For my college, we automatically take a Japanese class to continue learning the language while studying abroad, but the classes we have to take that go towards our major (Asian Studies) are in English. We have the option of taking classes in Japanese, but for most of us it wouldn't be very beneficial since our Japanese isn't good enough just yet.

Professors in Japan...hm. It really depends on the college. For example, Sophia University, half of their student population is foreign, so of course they speak English. At a school that has less of a focus on "foreign" ness or whatever, than the tendency is they speak a lot less, or none at all (what they were forced to learn in high school, basically)

In a place like Nanzan, it's somewhere in between the two.. it's actually a Catholic university, believe it or not, the president of the university is German. A huge focus of the college is overseas work, so a lot of the professors speak at least some english.... in the social sciences and foreign services departments at least. Science and engineering? Not so much XD

To make a very generalized statement, it's like how professors teaching humanities or international affairs classes in american colleges are much more likely to speak a foreign language than those in engineering or math/science related fields.