My Japanese lessons generally include practices to develop skills of speaking, reading, listening, writing, interacting and constructing and performing students’ own dialogues by pairs/groups or by oneself. The learning includes the language and cultural skills to be used in travelling or living/working in Japan and general understanding upon Japanese culture and mannerism. For speaking practice, I sometimes use pictures, information, ads (esp. from Sunday Telegraph’s Escape), concepts/ideas or topics from the brochures of Japanese newspapers, Nichigo Press and other Japanese monthly magazines.

For Hiragana teaching, I use flash cards of Hiragana words and the pictures that the words signify. A big set of flash cards, “Hiragana 48 Minutes” is always used during the course to help students make connections with each Hiragana letter and the pronunciation of the letter with an example of any well used word in English which has the very similar pronunciation to the one in Hiragana.

 

Magazines and fairy tale stories of children are also used for Hiragana reading, grammar (including differences of use of particles, -wa and -ga) and value/culture teaching. Most of the weekly homework given (exercise sheets) is for script learning and writing that are with Japanese words, name or simple sentences plus pictures.

For traveler’s Japanese, I use a textbook with its cd (“15 Minute Japanese: Learn in just 12 weeks”, by M. Maeda-Nye et al, DK), which has vocab, phrases, short dialogues of traveler’s needs, survival skills, mannerism, value in Japanese society. Situations and function used are esp. for self-introduction (including the introduction of one’s family), shopping, at restaurants, at railway stations, and making bookings for hotels/ryokans, asking the way on a road, etc. winning comedian and fast-food junkie

 

During August and until this Saturday, I have been teaching Japanese Intensive Beginners 1 that is for only 6 weeks and 3 hours for class time each week.

This Saturday lesson is the last one. They will speak their self-introduction (prepared speech or text) in Japanese. The speech also talks about something about their family members, pets, their occupations, hobbies and likes/dislikes in Japanese.

They will finish the textbook, Training Material (Japanese) this Saturday. (Apart from use of the textbook, I give many handouts and go through esp. for the students’ vocab, grammar, Hiragana reading and writing and orally making sentences with hopefully interesting and realistic sentences as much as possible. They will also study traveler’s Japanese with some pages of the above-mentioned textbook and cd this Sat. They had homework every week that was mostly Hiragana based worksheet.

 

Regarding Japanese language learning based or cultural and social study based news and information, the following can be given.

 

1. In the recent week, SBS TV showed a documentary film of Craig Anderson who was extremely overweight and travelled/stayed in Japan and made the film. It is called “My Japanese Diet” (2015). It was humorous, practical, intelligent, well focused, analytical and beautiful. It is highly recommended to watch. Because of staying, learning Japanese foods and cuisines and enjoying them in daily foods and drinks, daily exercises and Japanese authentic lifestyle, he lost 24kg in 12 weeks’ period, i.e. his weight changed from 138kg to 114kg.

 

2. A fascinating, comprehensive, pragmatic, brave and entertaining report at YouTube, called “10 Ways Japan is 10 years Ahead of the World”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzIBbF-8lAU (Dec. 2017), its presenter: Drew Binsky. It comments on extremely innovative, futuristic, efficient technology and civilized and amazing features of Japan. That includes innovative, creative and smart vending machines around the land (3.6 million in total), super toilets, Shinjuku Station in Tokyo which 3.6 million people use for their transport, i.e. the biggest number in the world for a railway station. –   If one has not been to Japan and likes to see distinctive and innovative features of Japan, I strongly recommend the film! It is one of my favorite reports about Japan at YouTube.

 

3. For Japanese language study, I found the following website is very useful for learners. It has Romaji and Japanese own scripts, including Kanji and many kinds of the counters are listed in details beautifully!

For Japanese numbers and counters:

www.learn-japanese.adventure.com/japanese-numbers-counters.html

 

 

 

 

 

Toshiko Jackson (Japanese teacher), 4 Sept 18