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. Speaking practice sometimes used the use of the pictures, concepts or topics from the brochures of the Japan National Tourism Organizations, Jenta, Nichigo Press, Daily Telegraph etc.

My Pre-Intermediate 2 has been studying with Unit 6, Genki Book 1 (having finished learning the conjugation of i-adjectives and na-adjectives from the previous Unit and in Unit 6, verb, te-forms are especially important to master) and Kanji learning with use of the Kanji learning pages of the back of the text book.

The Pre-Intermediate 1 is studying late Unit 4 of the above book. Similar to the above class, that class is learning Kanji and its words with the use of back of the textbook.

Apart from the above teaching, as the assignments from SLS, I took interpreting role for 2 full days. The client was through Forum Group and the company concerned deals with technological products which save fuel in automobiles. Both the Australian clients and Japanese CEO who I had to do interpreting for were very easy to work with, passionate about their work, pleasant, open, intelligent/intellectual and well informed. So, I had a great time for the job indeed. (The Japanese CEO, in some way, reminded me of late Konosuke Matsushita who was the founder of Panasonic (previously National Panasonic). So lively, energetic, alert, broadly and in essence, humble minded and interested in many things of the world (and he had always full of smiles that creates energy to people around!) I said to someone that the gentleman was like the one of “forever young at heart”!

Regarding the news on Japan, I said the following things in classes. They are mostly from the NHK TV news (shown at SBS TV during the past 4 weeks) and Jenta magazine.

The Professor Amano Hiroshi (Nagoya Uni.), Prof. I. Akazaki and Prof. S. Nakamura received the Nobel Prize in Physics. It was the discover of blue LED. The blue LED can be used for many things and purposes. For example, traffic lights, vehicles, interior designs, medical equipment (e.g. thin tubes which are used to examine the human internal organs more deeply than past equipment), fishery (the light will go much deeper in the ocean) etc. It has more durability than lights used around the world in the past and it will save cost greatly in many industries.  – In the past, Nagoya University received the donation of ¥14,0000,0000 out of the past Nobel Prize winning by one of the above professors. –   What a wonderful story!

Today, a Japanese, beautiful and brilliant horse, Admire Rakti died with the heart attack after his great achievement at Caufield Cup in Melbourne and yesterday’s Melbourne Cup where he was the top favorite of punters among all the stayers. It was really sad. I hope the owner, trainer and jockey will not be totally disappointed (though they must have shattered for a while, after all the great expectation) and will keep having a great dream and come back again for the future race and make a Japanese horse run in Australian land.

Japanese Teacher, Toshiko Jackson,