<p>I was thinking of taking Japanese at Harvard. I have had no previous experience, so I wanted to take the Elementary Japanese (Ba and Bb), which is precisely for people like me who have had no experience.</p>
<p>But I wanted to take four other courses, and I wanted to speak with my advisor about taking one extra course: Japanese. I have already memorized the katakana and hiragana, but I thought that it may be too difficult?</p>
<p>I catch onto languages pretty easily...</p>
<p>Does anyone have any of their own experiences to share about Elementary Japanese?</p>
<p>I don’t know anything about elementary Japanese at Harvard. But you definitely can’t take five classes freshman fall (it would probably be a bad idea to do so, even if it were allowed).</p>
<ol>
<li><p>College language courses – almost anywhere, not just Harvard – are orders of magnitude more intensive than their high school equivalents. With a “difficult” language like Japanese, it is probably one of the hardest courses you could take. Not a throwaway add-on by any stretch of the imagination.</p></li>
<li><p>One of my cousins started taking Japanese her sophomore year at Harvard. She did a semester in Japan at the start of her senior year, got a masters at Columbia Journalism School, and spent the next 15 years working as a journalist in Japan.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Elementary Japanese at Harvard will be the toughest butt-kicking you’ll ever love.</p>
<p>Do not take it with four other courses, especially if you’re thinking of it as the “extra course.”</p>
<p>Memorizing the kana ahead of time will help you only with the first two days of class. You will be expected to memorize them overnight after the first class if you do not know them already. You don’t want to take this class freshman fall unless Japanese is your first academic priority, which it clearly is not.</p>
<p>Thanks, Hanna! THAT gives me a perspective on whether or not I should take that class, but before I rule it out of my freshman year for sure, could I ask one more question? If the katakana and the hiragana are done by the first two days of class, what is the class other than that? I know from course description that it has 180 Chinese characters for kanji, but I thought that was all just memorization? And for the elementary grammar things, is the pace of the class really fast?</p>