Course Description
The Japanese writing systems will be introduced from the very beginning of the course. Students are required to master both HIRAGANA and KATAKANA. KANJI (Chinese characters) will be gradually introduced for both recognition and writing. We will spend the first four weeks learning 46 HIragana characters. After completing Hiragana, we will spend another three weeks learning 46 Katakana characters. When we finish learning Katakana, we start learning 12 kanji per lesson starting with very basic ones such as numbers.
JPN 1014 provides students with the fundamentals of introductory Japanese, offering the opportunity to develop listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. It consists of four modules including self-introduction, shopping, inviting someone to do something, and asking for a location. During the first module, students will learn how to introduce themselves by talking about their major, age, hometown, and telephone number. Basic numbers from 1 to 100 are introduced in the first module, so students also learn how to tell times. In the second module, students learn how to shop in Japan and learn how to count currency in Japanese and ask for help at the store, and carry a small conversation with a sales clerk. Bigger numbers like 100 to 10000 are introduced to tell prices in Japanese. They also learn the concept of location such as here, there, and over there. In the third module, students will learn how to invite someone to do something, e.g., "Won't you play tennis with me?", and learn how to talk about daily routine schedules. For example, "I have Japanese classes on Monday. I wake up at 7:00 a.m. and eat breakfast at 8:00." In the fourth module, students learn how to ask for a location, e.g., "Excuse me, where is ...?" "The restaurant is next to the coffee shop." and so forth.
Japanese is quite different from English, and therefore, all the more interesting and challenging. Since Japanese is radically different from the other Western languages, this course may be very demanding: students should attend all classes and be encouraged to practice Japanese on a daily basis.
We were reviewing Genki Lesson 3. In Genki lesson 3, students can finally talk about things they do daily, such as; "I wake up at 7:00 a.m." "I drink coffee every morning." and "I sometimes watch TV." They learn basic action verbs such as "to eat, sleep, drink, do, study, return, go, come, etc.". They also learn frequency words such as often, sometimes, not often, and not at all." Students not only talk about what they do, but they also learned how to ask questions such as "what time do you get up?" "Do you eat breakfast?" and "Do you play sports" to find out things what their classmate regularly do in their everyday life. Furthermore, they learn how to invite their friends to watch a movie, go to a cafe, and eat lunch together. So this is the lesson, in which students finally make an exciting conversation. That is a lot of learning!
This video shows their 11th week of learning the Japanese language. Most of the students never learned Japanese before but they now learned and memorized 46 hiragana symbols and 46 Katakana symbols. Students know how to write their names in Katakana. They also practiced how to read a hamburger menu written in Katakana. Right now, they are learning how to write numbers and times in Kanji!
In today's exercise like in this video, students must find six students who match the description in the textbook. The descriptions are written in English, so they first translate the sentences into Japanese. They must know new words and Japanese sentence structures and then converse with their classmate. This looks like a simple exercise but there are so many complex learning processes involved. Imagine yourself learning a new language 10 weeks ago, and now you know how to read the new writing system, pronounce the words, and make a sentence with the Japanese sentence structure. These Japanese students made so much effort to learn a new language and I am so proud of them.
