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. My new Pre-Intermediate 1 made wonderful dialogues by pairs or group and performed them in front of class last week. That was terrific, including the language and contexts expressed!

Also, I weekly tutor the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, N1 to a student who has studied Japanese at a major university in Sydney. He is very highly motivated, earnest, diligent and creative, so it is very interesting to teach him. The materials, which we use, are commercially sold books for preparation of the Test N1. That is, for vocab, grammar, reading comprehension and listening. Occasionally I ask his views or experiences in Japanese, in relation to any topics appeared especially the passages for reading comprehension. Apart from going through all the samples questions from those books and use of CDs, we read intelligent, meaningful and inspiring articles which are from magazines etc. The topics are various. (They can be from political, economic, technological, cross culture based, linguistic based, multi-lingual, international trade based, any major cultural topic orientated for Japanese civilization etc.) Last week, we read and went through some vocab and meanings of the Japanese article on the future trade between Japan and Australia, in the Jenta Sydney (11.4.14, p. 22), “Gyuuniku –wa dageki osaete, hikisage” (=As for beef, going to make the impact less hard and make the tariff to be lower and that Japanese car manufactures’ export to Australia will have the helpful wind for the companies).

In my last month’s Blog, I could not include the following (due to time shortage). I just mentioned them briefly since they are great news. They are from NHK TV news (7pm news) during April and early May.

Japan starts sending its space ship for the first time. (The US has been doing that with the joint program with the UK.) The Japanese space ship will go up to about 110 kilometers in the space that is less than the US space ships. The cost for the trip to the space by the Japanese space ship is about ¥25 million. Many people have applied for being the passengers.

In department stores in Tokyo, they began having smart phones which do the roles of  interpreting for 5 languages and up to even 10 languages, for overseas visitors and tourists. The function is very fast and overseas tourists were commenting that the phones are very helpful and they can find out any answers for inquiries. Similarly, department stores in Ginza, Tokyo reported that the numbers of overseas visitors who visited the stores this year so far increased twice of the numbers compared to last year. Very good news.

Japanese Teacher, Toshiko Jackson

4.6.14