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A virtual classroom where beginners can learn to read and write Japanese. New students welcome! 

Tags: Japanese, Academy, Japan, Learn, School 

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Kai Shi
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PostPosted: Wed May 18, 2011 8:57 pm
If you want practice or help with things, please feel free to PM~! Not saying I have all the answers (because I sure don't!).  
PostPosted: Wed May 18, 2011 9:01 pm
Starry Starry Fright
xPrince of Rosesx
In Lesson Six-Colors! Starry doesn't post the sentence where you place your favorite colors.
In Lesson One-Introducing yourself,she does!
Example:
Watashi no namae wa _____ desu!!
Or
Watashi wa _____ desu!!
How does she expect me to learn the Lesso Six-Colors sentence if SHE didn't post it!!!
I AM SO PISSED!!!!
I REALLY WANT TO LEARN JAPANESE BUT SHE!!! DOESN'T POST THE SENTENCES LIKE IN LESSON ONE-INTRODUCING YOURSELF!!!!
If i find another Lesson like that imma find a study partner to never see her mistakes!!!
DONE!!!!


Dude. You need to seriously calm down. I am not a paid Japanese instructor, nor am I a certified teacher. I'm a university student with limited time on my hands and other priorities, offering free instruction out of my love for language. I never claimed that this place would make you fluent. It's only one resource out of many that are available.

Incidentally, if you actually read through all of the lessons, you'll find that I have given you more than enough resources to list your favorite colour. In fact, I go over this exact sentence in lesson sixteen.

http://www.gaiaonline.com/guilds/viewtopic.php?t=20868389

Just to clarify, not including fill-in-the-blanks style sentences in every lesson is not a "mistake", as you seem to think. If that's how you learn everything you say in Japanese, I can promise you that you will never grasp Japanese grammar. I posted pre-made sentences in the earlier lessons so that absolute beginners, with no experience whatsoever, could get a taste of what Japanese sentences look like. Topics on how to figure out Japanese grammar for yourself are included in some of the later lessons. This guild is set up so that the earlier lessons will build up your vocabulary so that you will have a bank of words to draw from when you start to learn sentence structure in the later lessons.

As I've mentioned before, I am a linguistics and neurobiology student, and I take that into account when I plan lessons; I understand that point-blank memorization is not useful to students who hope to learn to generate their own sentences (i.e. those who plan to achieve fluency). I don't tend to go into specifics about the extent of the challenges of learning Japanese as a native English speaker, but I think I need to reiterate this; when your brain reached its critical language stage in infancy, most of you were speaking English, which is a Germanic language. Germanic languages often require large amounts of memorization, as they are filled with pre-set sentences and exceptions to grammatical rules. Japanese is from the Agglutinative language family, which follows almost unbreakable rules of morpheme combination. In other words, when I teach you Japanese, I am not helping you out by teaching you to rely on pre-made sentences I provide. It's much, much better for me to teach you the rules and allow you to experiment with generating sentences for yourself. That's why I have students post comments after each lesson; trying out grammatical rules for themselves and seeing the corrections will help them learn.

It's not my responsibility to tailor my lessons for individual needs. They are, like everything else on here, merely a resource. You have plenty of opportunity to contact either myself or my prefect, Kai Shi, if there is something that you don't understand, and you are expected to do so in a polite manner. Those students who have read through all of the lessons (such as Phoenix of Darkness) and attempted to figure out the grammar for themselves by trying out sentences and asking for help are the students that have made the most noticeable progress.


Completely agree Starry! It's amazing to see people improve so dramatically and to start seeing them put together sentences on their own. This is, afterall, the reason we're all learning Japanese.

I'll say this here and this goes for everybody! If you ever want more explanations/different explanations/more examples/etc. on a lesson, please ask! We're here to help but keep in mind that we have jobs/school too and are still only learners ourselves.  

Kai Shi
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 09, 2011 2:09 pm
I agree with starry on this one. I have to say the lessons are important it is good thing to ask.  
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Japanese Academy

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