Japanese Class 1

This introductory course will help students gain a basic understanding of the Japanese language with a focus on conversational Japanese. The course introduces a variety of greetings and common expressions, and help students participate in social situations where they share simple personal details in Japanese. Students will also be introduced to the Japanese writing system, formalities, culturally appropriate practices, and some key grammar elements to produce simple sentences.

Through this course, students will be able to

• Appropriately demonstrate a variety of greetings and parting phrases.

• Demonstrate the use of a variety of basic and essential daily expressions such as yes/no, thank you/sorry, and excuse me.

• Practice introducing themselves appropriately.

• Practice sharing simple personal details such as where they live, likes/dislikes, and talents and skills.

• Examine basic sentence structures and create simple sentences about themselves.

• Examine the roles of particles in Japanese and become familiar with some basic particles.

• Recognize basic hiragana characters and distinguish them from other characters (katakana and kanji).

• Examine some practices, beliefs and attitudes that characterize Japanese culture.

There are three writing characters in Japanese, Hiragana（ひらがな）, Katakana（カタカナ）, and Kanji (漢字). This course will introduce these writing characters and explain the different functions. In particular we will go over the basic Hiragana characters as part of a warm-up activity in the beginning of the lesson. However, please understand that learning the writing characters will not be the focus of this course since we would like to provide you with as many conversation opportunities as possible. Roman letters will be used in the lesson slides, and we will add some Japanese characters whenever the space permits. This is not to say that learning the Japanese characters is not important. In the long-run, knowing the hiragana and katakana is very helpful and accelerates your Japanese learning. In class, we will be sharing some resources that are useful for learning Japanese characters.