Classroom vs. immersion

Having recently returned to classroom study of Japanese, I've been thinking about the differences in what/how I'm learning, compared with my time in Tokyo. Over the summer, I had almost no formal instruction in spoken Japanese - there was a professor at Tokyo Uni that gave me very valuable lessons in beginning to really study Kanji, but we didn't really spend any time on speaking or grammar. So, my 'education' was mainly in trying to communicate with Japanese people.

One problem is, of course, that people will not usually correct you when you make a mistake. It's only natural, and I do it to ESL persons all the time, because if the meaning is understood, it's only going to slow the conversation down to stop and explain why it should be said differently.

Another problem, I guess more significant in Japanese than most languages, is learning to distinguish the different levels of polite vs impolite, slang, etc. For example, I went for a few days referring to things as ちょうやばい before someone pointed out that this was roughly equivalent to "fucking awesome", or at least made me sound like a Shibuya teenager. Whoops. In general, I tried to do my best to appropriately use regular and polite verb forms, but it was very easy to fall into the habit of dropping です and particles from simple sentences (i.e., これがすきよ）, which I guess is pretty informal.

Another observation was that people who I felt comfortable enough to practice Japanese with (i.e., that I didn't mind making mistakes in front of) were also people with whom conversation was informal. Consequently, I had much more practice with informal Japanese, except for polite stock phrases (おさきにしつれいします was key!).

So, all-in-all, I'm glad to be back in the classroom. Ideally, I'd be doing both - a little bit of class everyday, and immersion the rest of the time - but that's not an option at the moment.