Tuesday 4 August 2009

A Japanese language teacher

I’ve been thinking about becoming a Japanese language teacher since I came to Manchester two years ago. There is an international organization and they always welcome volunteer language teachers. Each one term has 10 lessons and one lesson is 90 minutes. In every term, I felt that I wasn’t ready for teaching Japanese. Finally I notice I would never be ready for teaching Japanese in future so I decide to start this term.
I thought it would be the most difficult to teach beginners class because Japanese is different from any other languages in characters and grammars. I had no idea which I should start to teach so I asked possibility to teach intermediate class. However the Society told me there were no intermediate Japanese speakers in Manchester. I had no choice but to teach beginners class.
In my first lesson, I was planning to teach Japanese pronunciation with Hiragana letters, how to introduce ourselves, some standard greetings and counting numbers. I thought it would take 90minutes.
My students are from China, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand and Germany. They evaluated their Japanese levels were almost zero however all of them pronounce Japanese without problem. I noticed Japanese pronunciation is quite easy for them. In addition their quick answeres and understanding amazed me. If I teach them how to count numbers in Japanese, they immediately understand the rules and remember them and use them without problem. So I finished everything within 90minutes so I prepared more curriculums from the second lesson. I’ve already finished seven lessons.
The other day, my Japanese friend bumped into my Korean student. He spoke to my Japanese friend in Japanese and she thought he was Japanese! This is a big progress and it made me happy. Just three more lessons are remaining and I’d like to form some particular vocabularies and useful phrases in their mind.

2 comments:

urbansplash said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
urbansplash said...

can you teach me japanese as well?? my name is karen..

i am not a complete beginners..

please contact me through my email.

urbansplash@yahoo.com