Japanese Lesson for Beginners

Session 113.Oct.2014

Kana Shimohigoshikshimo@essex.ac.uk

Beginners’ Course Aims

- Speaking basic conversation

- Reading/Writing basic Japanese letters

(e.g. Hiragana and hopefully Katakana)

- Introducing a part of Japanese cultures

- Making friends who have the same interests

- Getting your partner of language exchange

Sharing your experiences/interests(For general students)-Name-Nationality-What do you study?

-Why do you want to learn Japanese?-Have you learnt Japanese before? How long?-What made you have an interests in Japan?

-What do you hope to gain from this class?

(For JP students)-Name-Where are from in Japan? -What do you study?

-What does make you feel happy to have been born Japanese?

-Introduce what is like your hometown

What is Japanese?

Japanese language uses 3 characters, besides the Arabic Numerals and the Roman alphabet.

Hiragana（ひらがな）

Katakana（カタカナ）

Kanji（漢字）

ノルウェイの森(1987)村上春樹

“「私のヘアスタイル、好き？」「すごく良いよ」

「どれくらい良い？」と緑が訊いた。

「世界中の森の木が全部倒れるくらい素晴らしいよ」

と僕は言った。”

“「どれくらい私のこと好き？」と緑が訊いた。

「世界中のジャングルの虎がみんな溶けてバターになって

しまうくらい好きだ」と僕は言った。”

Norwegian Wood (1987)Haruki Murakami

“Like my hairstyle?’ she asked.‘It’s great.’

‘How great?’

‘Great enough to knock down all the forests of the world.’ I said.”

“How much do you love me?’ Midori asked.

‘Enough to melt all the tigers in the world to butter,’ I said.”

Kanji漢字

- Most complicated character in Japanese

- Chinese origin words

- Exists over 40,000 kanji

- About 2,000 are commonly used in Japan

- Each one has a meaning

- Can have many meanings frequently

- Content words, such as nouns, adjectives and verbs

Hiraganaひらがな

- The basic Japanese phonetic characters

- There are 46 hiragana symbols

- Represents every sound

- Do not have meaning

- Creating grammatical structure, such as particles, conjunctions, prefixes, suffixes, and many adverbs

Katakanaカタカナ

- Represents the same set of phonetic sounds as Hiragana

- Phonetic characters for foreign words

- Onomatopoeia (seen in manga)