Hi everyone, 皆さん、こんにちは。

My Japanese classes/lessons included the practices to develop speaking, reading, listening, writing, interacting, constructing and creating dialogues as well as cultural skills and knowledge upon Japan. Also, we used textbooks (our major one is Genki Book 1), pictures, ads, children’s books, magazines, CDs, videos, DVDs, songs, gestures with songs etc. At the end of each class of 10 weeks, an exam was given (if the student wishes to have it as an open exam, that was done in that way.)

As for use of flash cards to increase knowledge of vocab, sentences construction and script reading skills, for the recent few weeks, I have been using “Hantai-kotoba-kaado” (Kumon) that has many beautiful cards in Hiragana and Kanji (Chinese characters) with use of words that are commonly used nouns, adjectives and verbs. Each card has lovely, cute or funny pictures that indicate the words concerned. Each card has a word on one side and its antonym (word of the contrary meaning) on the back. The cards were very useful, interesting to use and helpful to make sentences and short dialogues.

A few times, I used exciting pictures from magazines, including MX magazine, e.g. picture of a beautiful white baby lion that is in the UK zoo. The class listened to my Japanese sentences or students said some sentences in reference to the report on the article. For example, “The baby lion’s mother is Kya.”, “The white baby lion is cute.”

At Internet, you can see many articles on Japanese newspapers. About a month ago I saw gorgeous photos of “waves” of Japanese cherry blossoms in the middle of Tokyo, in Yomiuri newspaper (shimbun). However, the season was over and couldn’t show it to classes. And I found the inspiring article(s) of Japanese newspapers, so I reported that to classes. I believer such printed media has enormously contributed to Japanese democratization, world’s highest literacy rate and people’s life span, impressive peace and order in the society in the post modern times, their cherishing good, traditional values, practice and consistency, technological sophistication, communal attitude etc.

Related to the above topic, one of the article reports (from INA Globa Press Article, “Yomiuri Shimbun – The giant of the Japanese press”:  “With more than 10 million copies sold everyday, Yomiuri Shimbun is not only the largest daily newspaper in Japan, but also the largest in the world. The circulation of Yomiuri Shimbun is greater than that of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street combined. Around 50 million newspapers are sole each day in Japan, where 90% of the public reads newspapers.  —–   (in p. 7 of that article,) Yomiuri Shimbun was founded in 1874 (i.e. soon after the end of Edo Period and start of Meiji Period); Asahi Shimbun was in 1879; Mainichi Shimbun was in 1872 and Nikkei Shimbun was in 1876; Sankei Shimbun was in 1913.

The above first four newspapers are national newspapers and its circulation rates are all extremely high in the world’s standard. Also, there is an English newspaper, The Japan Times. All of Yomiuri, Asahi, Mainichi and Nikkei newspapers have English versions daily.

 

Japanese Teacher, Toshiko Jackson

3.5.13