So let me tell you about my situation- I'll be getting my GED in six months- which makes me 15 and a half yup pretty young, but anyway- six months, and after that I was planning on enrolling in a community college for two years- and getting a double major in biology and english, which will hopefully take two years (or less if I take some summer courses) which will leave me at eighteen. Then I will hope to transfer to a four year college and finish out my double major graduating at age twenty. Now- for my real reason for typing all this nonsence. My real hope is that at the age of twenty(21 if I decide to go to a language school to get rid of my accent ), I will be able to apply and be admitted to a Japanese medical school. See the words ''Japanese medical school' appeared now cutting the responses to this in half. I suppose I just really want to know if I have those four years of college under my belt will that help me out acceptance wise despite having a GED? Thanks!!!!!

My daughter also want you to know there are medical students from Japan, but those students are the CREAM OR THE TOP students that are enrolled at Todai or Kyodai University Medical School and each have passed the Stanford Medical School entrance exams in English!

Will you be able to pass the entrance exams to Stanford Medical School? Better yet, will you pass the entrance exam to Japanese Medical School in Japanese?

So lets be realistic, o'k? GED is basically 9th grade level; nothing wrong with attending the community college and than to 4 years college or university for BA or BS degree; and then to the graduate school or medical school, however, you will need to pass the GSAT and be on top of the class.

So study hard and make your dream a reality!

Good luck,

what does matter is that the GED is probably not going to be looked upon favorably by some universities without other college or university credits.

that being said, the most important thing is that you are able to pass the entrance examinations of the japanese universities you'd like to enter.

this means complete fluency in japanese. if you're 15 or 16 now and want to enter when you're 21 or 22 i think that's realistic...however..... it is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN IF YOU ARE LIVING IN NORTH AMERICA. you CANNOT become fluent while living in north america. don't even bother trying.

you need to live in japan to get fluent. to pass the medschool exams in japanese you need a vocabulary larger than most normal japanese people have as well as greater knowledge of kanji than most japanese people have. you're already at a 15 year disadvantage, living abroad while trying to study japanese just handicaps you further.

I just wanted to add I will be taking a two month trip to Japan this summer before school starts just to experience the land and see just how up to par my Japanese really is- I also would like to say I definately dont think in any way my Japanese will be good enough to at a medical school level by the time I have graduated a four year college, and so I ABSOLUTELY do plan on attending a language school in Japan for at Least a year until I feel I could keep up with my Japanese peers. That is if things go as planned! Another thing, on the money area, I've had a job since I was fourteen, cleaning salons & buisnesses throughout my city(how I hate cleaning *geh*) It brings in pretty good money though- and when I turn sixteen I'll be dropping that and getting a normal teenage job, & all of my earnings will be going into savings. I also recieve support from my father- so money wont be an issue-

I did hear of a man from Malaysia who after taking only a year of Japanese was accepted into a Japanese Medical school- he was on some forum- he wasnt doing very well though I have to confess, but he was hanging on for dear life and from what I heard he has long graduated. So thats pretty interesting- though I'm definately not putting my hopes on his success!

And I also wonder why you want to go to a Japanese university. There are definitely better and cheaper ones in the States or Europe. Concerning the language requirement: YES, you have to be fluent in Japanese to be accepted!

I also wrote and other have, you should apply to the medical school of your country. Somehow I believe you been misled by others to believe you can "simply" get into medical school in Japan with "ONLY" one year of Japanese studies - so lets be practical - in school how well did you in 1 year time learn and ABSORVE the foreign language you had to take?

You may not realize that Japanese family through their child's school years dedicate all their resources so their child may get into a specific elementary, junior high, high school with a blind hope that their child may be accepted to a specific university,... and their child would be LUCKY enough to be accepted by ANY medical school, especially when all medical school have limited ENROLLMENT. Also you have read by another writer that medical school through exams will "TERMINATE" unworthy medical students,....and that's very true. How do I know? Allow me to explain - my brother was a medical student at Kyodai or Kyoto University Medical School and while he was a medical student (only 50 students were accepted that year) he noticed a empty seat in the class and more empty seats after each exam - by his final year only 8 became a doctor from the original 50 students . Just to let you know my (deceased) brother was a professor of surgery at Kyoto University Medical School.

So what happened to those students that was terminated? Most applied with another (lower tier) medical school (Kyodai Medical School is equivalent to Harvard Medical School) and became a doctor. So what is the moral of this story? Very simple,.. you don't have to graduate from the top tier college or university, nor do you have to go to Harvard Medical School, after all, you will be called, "DOCTOR" as along as you can pass the medical tests that will be given in order for you to be licensed as a doctor - which is true in Japan and in United State.

It's good to have a dream of becoming,... but reality should tell you you will face the language barrier that will be insurmountable,... and your common sense should tell you to get into the native medical school. In concluding I commend you for thorough thinking about your future, so for now enroll in the community college and do well in all your studying,... that is the key!

Good luck.

National uni: JPY3.5mil (approx. US$35,000)
Private uni : JPY22.4mil (approx. US$224,000)

Normally students need to go to prep school to pass the exam for medical schools.
The average cost for prep school is JPY1.1mil (= US$11,000) a year.

I've got a friend who teaches high school English at a school in California and she has studied Japanese extensively on her own. She can speak Japanese fairly well (with an accent, obviously) and get her point across, but her vocabulary is still limited so she doesn't always understand what is being said, and her listening skills are fairly poor. We met in Japan, and by the time we both left, at the end of our year of teaching there, my listening skills were almost on par with hers, and I went to Japan with the ability to count to 10 and say "Good afternoon." Bottom line; if you want to be fluent in Japanese, you should live there.

I teach at a small technological university in the Midwest of the U.S., and we have students of various nationalities that come here to study. The vast majority of those students have to spend a minimum of one year doing remediation of their English, to get them to a point that they can learn in an English speaking environment. They are doing engineering work, which is mostly in the mathematics anyway, and they still have to spend a good chunk of time intensively working on their English, despite the fact that many of them have studied it sense they were in grade school. For you to learn Japanese and then use it in a highly specialized setting like medical school in Japan seems a bit ... ambitious. From my experience, the field of medicine in Japan has its very own jargon, which you would need to learn in addition to normal Japanese, and the English medical jargon. I'm not saying that can't all be done, but if you want to climb a mountain, you might not want to start with Everest.

Might help for you to think about this; what are your goals for being an MD in Japan? What distinctive thing do you hope to accomplish there? Is it possible for you to accomplish it through a slighly less direct route? Maybe earning your MD in your home country while studying Japanese would be a good idea; perhaps you can eventually migrate to Japan as a doctor who is fluent in Japanese?