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 Pre-Intermediate 1 (that finished that level last week) worked with Unit 4, Genki Book 1 apart from Kanji learning with use of the Kanji learning pages located at the back of the above textbook. Also, for that class, I taught Japanese used for travel in Japan. Early in the course, I taught with some text for ordering foods at restaurants, currency exchange, buying train tickets, booking a hotel room (the text is originated from one I had edited for other organization of its online video course). Late month, I used with part of the material of other source and the situations of the language used were such as asking places or services at a hotel or ryokan, “Where is the bathroom?”, “Do you have room service?”, “I want to leave this in the safe?”, “Do you have more quiet room?” “I can’t turn on the heater.” etc. In that class, there was a student who had purchased the book which is for the preparation for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) 4-5. And I showed his book to the class. It appeared there are other students who are interested in the JLPT, so I said to the class that in future, including the next stage for them (if they will be enrolled), we might include learning time for Travel Japanese and the preparatory sessions of the JLPT with the agreement of all the participants of the class. That will be probably about 20~30% of the time to be spent of the 10 weeks’ course. All the students in that class seemed happy with that new element in the future course.

Apart from the above course, I weekly taught two students for their tutorials. One was for the JLPT N1 and the other was the JLPT N3. Both were lovely and very interesting students. One of them has to have a break due to his other commitments and the other will continue. To the former, I talked about my favorite and the Japanese, profoundly great business leader in the Modern Times, late Konosuke Matsushita, apart from other things on Japan. The student enjoyed and appreciated such information. Also, to my class/tutorials, I informed about the article of Escape, Sunday Telegraph, 20 July, ’14, pp. 28-29, “Bullet trains take the cake”. A big and fascinating article/report! It includes information that Japan celebrates the 50^th anniversary of its Shinkansen that began running in 1964 prior to the Tokyo Olympics.

The above report says the first Shinkansen, the Tokaido Shinkan took 4 hours to run between Tokyo and Osaka when it started running. Currently its Nozomi (the super-high-speed) makes the journey in 2.5 hours. It is the world’s busiest high-speed rail line, carrying more than 150 million passengers a year! There are 3 types of trains on the line, i.e. Nozomi (fastest), Hikari and Kodama.

The above article says Japan developed SCMAGLEV. It states “It (SCMAGLEV) stands for Super Conductive Magnetic Levitation. The MLXI Maglev prototype on display holds the world speed record for rail vehicles at an astounding 581km/h.” “By 2025, Japan aims to put commercial maglev trains into operation, which could shorten the Tokyo-Osaka trip to one hour.”   (- Sounds amazing!)

Japanese Teacher, Toshiko Jackson

5.8.14