ようこそみなさん！
     Welcome everyone to Beginners Japanese 1!  In this course, you 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 material that would be covered up through the Japanese Language Proficiency Test's rudimentary level, the JLPT-N5.  
     Students will learn new grammar concepts in class, where we will practice speaking and listening to one another with the grammar being studied that week.  Between classes, students will be enrolled in my flashcard course where they will be asked to study fifteen minutes a day to keep up with the material we are learning in class.  Besides the flashcard homework, this class does not have any other work outside of class, though later courses in the series will likely have short reading and writing assignments in Japanese.

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 talks 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 "て" form to get ready for Beginner's Japanese 2!