Course Goals & Objectives
The course goal is to provide a basic foundation that will enable students to acquire and develop language skills in listening, speaking, reading, and writing in Japanese. Throughout the process of learning these skills, emphasis will be on the student's ability to perform in "real-life" situations through task-based practice. Specifically, students will be able to achieve the following objectives by the end of the course:
Listening: Able to understand short, learned utterances and some sentence-length utterances, especially where context supports understanding and speech is clear. Comprehension is limited to vocabulary and some simple questions/statements related to everyday events, such as: greetings, introductions, and basic transactions in a post office, store, or restaurant. In addition, students should be able to undertand short, simple descriptions of familiar places.
Speaking: Able to make short statements and ask simple questions that are common to the situations mentioned above. This also includes the skill to ask questions that facilitate self-reliance in learning such as asking about meanings of unknown words and asking about locations. Students will be able to ask questions primarily by relying on memorized social formulae and set phrases, with occasional sentence-level expansion to meet the needs of contexts similar to those mentioned above.
Reading: Able to identify and understand written material in hiragana, katakana and frequently used kanji (about 50) without yomigana, with emphasis on survival and immediate needs, such as prices in stores, menus, dates on schedules, and short letters, messages, or memos relating information relevant to various aspects of student life.
Writing: Able to write hiragana, katakana, and about 50 kanji. Students should be able to compose short memo-type notes and diary entries in situations as described in the "Reading" section above.
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