Japanese Beginner 3 Course Training
Course overview
Japanese Beginner 3 course has 10 lessons, to be taken over 10 weeks in any weekday evenings or over 5 weeks in an intensive course on Saturdays.
Our Japanese Beginner 3 Course is designed for students with Hiragana and Katakana foundation and with 200+ words vocabularies. In this course, students will continue to practise Hiragana and Katakana, and learn 30 very interesting basic Kanji. In each lesson, students will practise natural pronunciation and conversations about gifting and offering, preference and desire, connecting a few sentences, and a confident two minutes self introduction. Our key grammar points covered include: more verbs in -masen ka, -masho, -masho ka form, and how to make request and invitation.
Lesson Topics
Lesson 1 – Recap and warm up practise
Lesson 2 – Asking for directions
Lesson 3 – Giving and receiving
Lesson 4 – Preferences
Lesson 5 – Mid course review
Lesson 6 – Dictionary verb form
Lesson 7 – Suggestions
Lesson 8 – I want to (Conjugation)
Lesson 9 – Verb te-form (serial verbs)
Lesson 10 – Total review & presentation
Understand the students
Most Japanese beginner students have strong interest in Japanese cultures and/or travelling to Japan. They might already have an idea of Hiragana, Katagana and Kanji, they might already think Japanese is not easy. But they admire the beauty of the language and fantasize this exotic culture, and have invested to learn speaking this exotic tongue.
Teachers should help them to bring that fantasy to live. Encourage them to practise writing and speaking everything Japanese. Teachers should use Japanese as much as you can, accompanied by English to help them understand.
In this course, it’s about balancing learning and fun for the students. Introduce the knowledge lesson by lesson, at the same time deepen their interests to this language lesson by lesson. You don’t want them to quit thinking it’s too challenging, you want them to come back for more lessons!
Understand the Material
For beginner learners, we have chosen the book “Japanese for Busy People.” This book is written by a group of teachers who use English as the medium language to teach Japanese to beginners, which aligns with our students’ needs. The traditional method of teaching Japanese using only native Japanese is very challenging in a language classroom like ours, we can only focus on using as much Japanese classroom instructions as possible coupled with English.
We opted for the Romanized version of the book since students will be learning Kana as they progress. Our primary goal is for students to speak Japanese, and using phonetics helps achieve this from the very first lessons. However, the book does have some disadvantages. Its grammar section lacks good explanations, ample examples, and there are issues with consistency and coherence. To address this, we have developed our own grammar training. Additionally, while the book includes many exercises for practicing the basics, they are not particularly well-designed. To compensate, we conduct review lessons using our own activities to engage students in practice. This approach ensures that students receive comprehensive and effective training in both grammar and conversations.
We are using Beginner 1-4 terms, each consisting of 10 lessons, to cover this book, totaling 60 hours. Given the tight curriculum, we must be selective in our learning focus, tutorials, and the exercises we choose from the book. In general, each new lesson should follow the flow designed in our PPT, and each course should include 2-3 review lessons.
course Introduction – Beginner 1-4
- Course curriculum
- Lesson flow
- Materials including PPTs, flashcards, activities and digital resources
- Your personal touch bringing culture and personal stories or interest
- Teaching techniques of a student-led classroom including lesson time control, varieties of interactions, ie T-SSS, S-S, S-TSS
- Teaching instructions and use of Korean in class
- Understand scaffolding and be aware of expansions
- Homework and student support
- Teacher training and support
How to use Kahoot
- We use Kahoot as an interactive assessment tool to test the students, best after students learn grammar or when they need a bit of fun to lift up the mood! In general, students love it! It can also be used as a review tool to refresh the knowledge students learnt before.
- It takes normally about 10 mins for 10 questions.
- Access to each lesson Kahoot links below, you will need to create your own account to use our Kahoot links.
Japanese Beginner 3 Kahoot Links
How to use quizlet
- Sign up to this course Quizlet class first, you and your students will need to request for full access, headoffice will approve when we receive the email notification.
- Look at the video, learn to use Quizlet functions, especially Live Group Game. It’s competitive and fun! However, it requires a minimum of 4 students to start the game.
- Encourage students to use Quizlet to review words after lesson on the phone. It’s effective and fun!
Understand
Understand the nature of active learning, is always by finding out “why” rather than hearing “why”.
Shift
Teacher shouldn’t be the busy person in the room, time and space should be given to the students to learn, practise and present.
Stand back
Except for tutorial part, most of the other activities should be done by students, become a facilitator, move closer to listen to students and help.
Class Management Tips
Class Dynamics
To warm up a group of strangers in the room, the teacher has to be the facilitator and set the tone.
Class WhatsApp
To maintain students sticking to the class, encourage them to share homework to their WhatsApp group.
Do things Together
The group bonds when they share good times together, learning in class, joining our workshops or going out together.