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Old 16th November 2008, 12:26 AM
synthia synthia is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: Currently traveling in Mexico
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Originally from usa.
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One of the advantages of a homestay is that if you get a good situation, it will be good for your language skills. Japanese is very difficult (it takes 18 months for the average student to learn the same amount of Japanese as could be acquired in three months of Spanish). One of the problems, besides the two alphabets and the characters and the rapidfire talk, is that there are local dialects, so that a lot of what you here isn't really useful to you. People speak proper Japanese when they talk to you, but the trick of eavesdropping or picking up things by listening to the person in front of you ask questions of the salesclerk doesn't work so well.
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