Learners will become familiar with and learn to read and write the 70 Katakana letters, as well as how to combine these letters to make additional sounds. In the course of doing so they will gain experience with recognizing letters in a variety of media and fonts, and gain skills in deciphering Japanese-ified English loan words (for example, スターウオーズ suta- uo-zu, "Star Wars"!). Learners will also gain a foundation in important introductory Japanese grammar and vocabulary, and experience an overview of Japanese culture.

I have been teaching Japanese to both adult and youth students for about 8 years, including one semester of assistant teaching at Villanova University and several years of working with Kawa Kawa Learning Studio's online platforms. I have a Bachelor's Degree in East Asian Studies and an N1 JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) certification. My family is Japanese-American on my mother's side, but she did not grow up speaking Japanese and so I primarily learned by self-study beginning when I was in high school. Through this experience of self-study and later my experience in education, I learned all about the pros, cons, and differences between of a wide range of resources for language learning, including many conventional resources (for example, which textbooks and websites have the best and worst grammar explanations) and unconventional but highly useful resources (for example, what Japanese musical artists make the best songs for vocabulary study). If you have any questions about this class, about me, or anything else ahead of signing up, please don't hesitate to ask!