Beginner's Japanese Flex Class

ようこそみなさん！
     Welcome everyone to Beginners Japanese 1!  In this flex course, we will learn the basics of speaking, reading, and writing as we dive into writing systems, vocabulary, and grammar!  This course and its subsequent course (Beginner's Japanese 2) is designed to teach students all the grammar material that would be covered up through the Japanese Language Proficiency Test's rudimentary level, the JLPT-N5.  

     Students will learn new grammar concepts through twice weekly, video lessons posted in the classroom.  Students will be asked to interact with the videos (practice writing and repeating Japanese words and phrases).  Subsequently, students will also have homework responses where they can practice writing or upload a spoken recording!  Students will be able to interact with both the teacher and other students in the section this way!  

     As students interact with the course content, such as by posting their Japanese written or spoken responses to various prompts, the teacher will respond with short video recordings encouraging the students and showing them other tips to improve their Japanese grammar, writing, and pronunciation.  At several key points in the class, the students in the course will have a project where they must collaborate to create a short and very simple Japanese story.  This will require creativity in communication as students will have to use the vocabulary and grammar they have at each level.  The teacher will help guide the process, as well as give tips to make the Japanese flow better and sound more natural.  

     Additionally, students will be enrolled in my flashcard course where they will review both words and grammar concepts we are learning in class.  This is an important time commitment for the course; I ask that students study between 15-20 minutes a day, 5-6 days a week through the flashcard course.  I will be able to monitor their progress through the flashcard app.  

The curriculum below focuses on verb grammar, but we will be learning nouns, particles, and other bits of grammar throughout the class :)

Week 1: We will learn our first Japanese writing system, Hiragana! (ひらがな)  We will also learn some basic "small talk" Japanese.
Week 2: We will begin learning Japanese verbs!  We will learn the polite form for present tense verbs and past tense verbs.
Week 3: We will learn the negative form of Polite verbs, and about asking a few questions!
Week 4: We will learn polite volitional forms (Let's do ...) and how to do past-negative polite verbs!
Week 5: You'll learn how to say what you want to do, and we'll study how to talk about doing something "too much".
Week 6: We will talk about going and coming to do something, and we will begin to learn about plain verbs (not polite-form... Yay!).
Week 7: This week we'll learn how to talk about what you like to do, and we'll talk about what we're good at (in Japanese).
Week 8: We will study how to say what we're bad at (a useful skill for a humble Japanese person :) and how to make future plans!
Week 9: We will study how to put plain verbs in the past tense and how to talk about doing a bit of two different things.
Week 10: We will study how to talk about "perfect tense" (I have done, I have not done), and how to make plain verbs negative!
Week 11: We will learn how to say, "please don't..." and also how to talk about "should" and "shouldn't."
Week 12: We will learn about putting plain verbs in the "past-negative" form and also we will learn about the "て" form to get ready for Beginner's Japanese 2!