I realized first internships can be scary. Really, really scary. All of a sudden, you have to work with people twice your age, in a new environment, where everybody knows what he has to do, while you don't really understand what's going on. It's easy to feel lost, so, based on my experiences, here are my tips:
Before the first day:
Learn a few things about where you're going to work. Who is the boss, what is the history of the building, how many people work there…
On the first day:
Find your balance while choosing your clothes. If you're going to work in a serious, intellectual or official environment, try to avoid the jeans/tee-shirt for this first day. You can always wear them later if you see other people doing so. If you're a woman, a skirt is a good option. Better seem a little bit overdressed than underdressed.
Be early, not "just in time". People don't like it when they have to wait for you, especially on the first day.
Introduce yourself to everyone. To the boss as to the cleaning lady. Smile and explain who you are and why you are there. It doesn't matter if you don't remember everybody's name, you can always ask them again later.
Have your lunch with people you're going to work with. You'll have plenty of time to go have lunch outside with friends later, but on the first day, spend as much time as you can with your colleagues.
If someone explains to you their job, be interested. Even if you think this job is boring, don't show it. They could be offended and you don't know why they're here yet.
Don't criticize anything. If something doesn't work, say it, but never criticize, because you don't know how things work for the rest of the time.
Next days:
Say hello to everyone, every day. Ask them how they're doing.
If you want to develop good relationships with your colleagues, small talk is the key. Ask them how was their weekend, holidays, evening. If they don't want to talk to you, they'll let you know, but at least you tried. You don't want your colleagues to think you don't care about them.
If you don't understand something, ask. You'll never seem stupid since you're here to learn. It's better than spending all your time doing nothing or scrolling through social media.
Carry a small notebook and a pen with you to take notes. Taking notes on your phone makes you seem unprepared.
If you need photos for your internship report, always ask before taking a photo.
Take every opportunity you can. Meetings, interviews, visits, lectures… You will learn tons of things and you'll show you're interested. Of course, find your balance: if you think you're being "too" invested, just stick to the essentials.
Keep your desk clean. It's important at home, it's even more important at work.
Don't be obsessed with your work hours. If your contract says you finish work at 6PM, don't leave your office at 6:00PM. Wait a few more minutes. Finish what you were doing, put your things together, then leave.
Take breaks though. It'll help you being focus. Have a coffee, go for a walk. 10-15 minutes are enough.
When you leave, say goodbye to everyone.
At home, read your notes and re-write them. It's better copying three pages a day than finding fifty pages at the end of a three-months long internship and being unable to remember what they're about.
After the end of your internship:
Write to your internship supervisor to thank them.
If you wrote an internship report, send it to your internship supervisor. They'll be glad to see you learned things with them.
Keep in touch with people you liked.
Enjoy your internship and learn everything you can!
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Learning japanese can be pretty tough for a whole lot of reasons when you are a Westerner, and we won't pretend to replace a good japanese textbook. Then again, when you have been through the learning process once, you might have some insights that can help others who will face the same challenges. In this section, we'll be sharing some random learning tips unrelated to any level, just some thoughts, patterns or moments of enlightenment that we have experienced while learning japanese.
Words that sound similar are tough to tell apart because, well, they sound similar and if you haven’t studied kanji, you will have no other way to differenciate them. If you are used to learning vocabulary with lists of words put together by themes, like "whatever you can find in a train station", "the human body", or "nuclear physics", whatever makes you tick, you won't notice that you've come across words that sound painfully similar until you actually need to recall them during a conversation. You will mix them or say one for the other although you thought you had them kept in tidy little boxes. When native japanese speakers try to figure out why you said “Let’s meet at the police” when you meant “Let’s meet at the wicket gate”, don’t bother saying they sound similar, because their response will always be : “But the kanjis are completely different!"
Our theory is that if you consciously memorised words by themes, your brain later notices that they sound similar and it creates another box for that group, unbeknownst to you, but without connecting it to the box that contains the meaning of the words. You end up with a very messy group of indistinguishable words that your mind accesses every time you try to pronounce one of them.
To avoid the confusion, you need to consciously create a link between the "sound" box and the "meaning" box. For that, you need to make a new list with all the words that you tend to mix up, and any other word you can think of that sounds similar, and then memorise this new list. You will end up with words that are not at all related in a seemingly meaningful way but it will help you distinguish them.
In a nutshell, the best way to learn, which is starting with kanjis and building up your vocabulary from there, like japanese kids would do at school, is also the toughest and the most time consuming. If you want to be able to communicate fast and won't need to write right away, you'll be learning by sounds, and you'll want to make tidy boxes with words that sound similar. What sounds similar can be subjective so there's no writing a whole textbook on the matter, but here are a few examples of words we always need to keep an inner eye on. Even if you don't read kanjis, you should be able to see how they can help avoid mixing up words with similar pronounciations.
