Hi everyone, 皆さん、こんにちは。                                    

                                                                                                                                   

My Japanese classes/lessons included practices to develop skills of speaking/talking, reading, listening, writing, interacting, and constructing/performing students’ own dialogues by pairs/groups. As for the main textbooks and materials, the Beginner 1 usedTraining Manual and other handouts for vocab, grammar etc. From Beginners 2 onwards, Genki Book 1 was used for the main textbook.

Also, apart from Japanese magazines (e.g. Jenta, Nichigo Press), Japanese newspapers, The Australian (esp. for news/current affairs on Japan), Daily Telegraph (its travel magazines and pictures of cute animals etc to make sentences/application of grammar in Japanese) were used. At the end of courses of 10 weeks, the students had an exam or open-exam which included features of vocab., grammar, dialogues construction, translation and script. – One of Beginners 1 classes did so well with dialogues making and performing, i.e. linguistically and in making creative/interesting contexts of the dialogues and performing them in the front of classroom, that was delightful.

In a lesson for a 6-year-old girl, I taught her shuuji (calligraphy) (more formal name is shodo) to practise Hiragana in caligraphy, learn vocab and enjoy the special, peaceful (mind/heart calming and clarifying activitity). Beforehand, I prepared small, pretty pictures which were cut out from magazines and flyers; in the lesson, I sticked them to the bottom corner of each white sheet so that her Hiragana writing of Japanese words in the middle of the sheets will reflect the pictures. The words/pictures included ones of Mt. Fuji (in front of big beautiful green tea leaves fields), cherry blossoms, sushi dish etc apart from her name. She enjoyed that activity. She has mastered stroke orders of many Hiragana letters, so her hiragana words in calligraphy was just like a native speaker’s calligraphy and very good. It was very worthwhile exercise. I plan to do similar activity with adult classes too once in a course. I recall that many years ago I taught shuuji as extra activity in a pilot program of Japanese course at a primary school in Melbourne for half a year. It had about 7 pupils (both boys and girls) in class. When the pupils were doing shuuji, the whole classroom was amazingly “so” quiet for about 20 minutes. Shuuji or calligraphy are good for any ages.

In my last month’s Blog, I reported about the Tokyo Motor Show this month (Dec. ’13) and the major Japanese car makers’ models at the Show which were tiny electric cars, esp. all-electric tandem-seat three-wheelers. Recently I found an Japanese newspaper article (Nihon-keizai-shimbun, 21.10.13, p. 33, “Denki-jidoosha, ritoo –de koohasshin”) on the increasing sales of such electric car/vehicle (EV) esp. in small islands which are away from the major islands, such as Honshuu and Kyuushuu. The article informs great merits of use of such very small electric cars. (The articles particularly report about Nissan and Toyota’s models.) That is, the drivers can go through narrow roads with great versatility (compared to use of conventional cars), energy cost for driving such cars is less than half of the cost paid for driving fuel based, conventional cars.

Those EVs can’t be driven for a long distance. One EV can run for 299km at maximum after charging battery each time. Those EV have different models. Some of them can accommodate 4 people in the car; some others can 3, 2 or 1 person. Apart from individuals (including people who are older people), business groups, esp. those of tourism based ones, and public offices, like City Councils, bought or rented such EV and use them for business, tourism and daily life. There are even daily rental cars of such are increasingly used. e.g. in a small island near to Kagoshima prefecture (located the south of Kyuushuu Island) and an island near to Kagawa prefecture, they have rental EV cars especially for tourists. The latter’s rental EV cars cost ¥8400/day. For that, there are clients who wait for those cars as “kyanseru-machi” (waiting for the car cancelled by someone else). Another amazing and inspiring innovation for people’s better life and such society!

Japanese Teacher, Toshiko Jackson

3.2.14