Anyone here went from a Japanese language school to university? I have some questions

>If you studied at a language school for 2 years, were you able to save enough money from part-time work to pay for university tuition? That's not possible unless you get a *wildly* improbably paying job. Students are limited to part-time work, and the work that most students get is generally minimum wage or very close to it. It's generally not possible to fully support yourself on student part-time work unless you're very talented in a specialized skill that pays well. The system is not self-supporting by design. The Japanese government doesn't want students to be able to fully support yourself. You need savings, and you will deplete those savings over the course of your education.

I did Japanese language school for 2 years then I went to university. If you have a good EJU scores, you get a scholarship for about 48000 yen each month for a year, it paid my rent for my first year in university. Pay tuition fee by part time job is hard, apply a tuition waiver or tuition reduction maybe a better idea. Get a high GPA, gain more scholarship maybe a good idea, too. Part time job only pays your bills, I think. I only know for graduated school though.

Mathematically I don't think that's possible. As a language school student you can work at most 28 hours per week. Assuming you're paid minimum wage around 1100 x 28 x 4 weeks = 123200 yen/month. Without any money you brought yourself, or some kind of scholarship, that amount is already tight for everyday living costs, and you can't save much, if at all. As a comparison, University tuition will cost you upwards of 500k per year.

For graduate school, yes, but I couldn’t afford it right off the bat either. Language school bled my savings dry even while working and there aren’t as many domestic scholarship opportunities if you don’t already belong to a university or have grades from a Japanese high school/university. (I only received a small lump sum for my grades in language school). So, I entered as a research student, studied and saved as much as I could during that year, only applied for a tuition exemption once during Covid, and have been fully funded since my second year of master’s (i.e., 5 years). As for the undergraduate path, I worked as a university lecturer up until last spring. There, many of my international students followed the same path, but because the university had connections with some of their respective language schools, many paid reduced tuition via an internal scholarship. Two of my students in their third year also passed the transfer test they needed to get into the same national university I’m now graduating from, so they’re pretty set.