Basic Japanese ①

Author: Xu Minmin
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2003-09-01
Features: Basic Japanese is one of the key teaching materials for Shanghai's general universities under the "Nineties" plan. The most distinctive feature of this textbook lies in:
1. Breaking the traditional grammar-centered textbook system and introducing the communicative teaching method and structural teaching method widely adopted in world language teaching. It integrates intensive reading, extensive reading, listening, and speaking to cultivate students' comprehensive language proficiency.
2. Drawing on collective wisdom and striving for excellence, it fully reflects the creativity and crystallization of collaborative authorship. The texts and exercises are compiled through collective discussion based on original content, demonstrating strong originality and practicality.
3. The selected texts cover a wide range of themes, are well-structured, up-to-date, and vividly written. With "situations" and "topics" closely related to the lives of international students as the main thread, and diverse "activities" creating meaningful language contexts, it stimulates students' interest in learning, combining systematicity and fun.
4. It emphasizes strengthening basic phonetic training and integrates listening, speaking, reading, writing, and translation through situational dialogues, making it comprehensive, contemporary, and forward-looking. This textbook is primarily aimed at undergraduate and associate-degree students but is also suitable for a broad range of Japanese learners. The teaching plan is designed for 10-12 hours per week, with approximately 220 hours per semester, covering about 1,300 vocabulary words. It comes with an exercise book, a summary of sentence patterns, vocabulary, and phonetic exercises, as well as audio cassettes.
The main content and basic structure of this textbook are as follows:
1. The textbook consists of 20 lessons, with the first 4 lessons dedicated to phonetics, focusing on:
(1) Pronunciation difficulties for Chinese learners of Japanese;
(2) Representative pitch patterns;
(3) Notation of loanwords and Roman letters.
2. Each lesson in the text section is composed of 6 parts: "Basic Conversations," "Short Essays," "Sentence Pattern Explanations," "Rest Park," "Sentence Pattern Exercises," and "Daily Phrases and Conversations."
3. "Basic Conversations" revolves around core topics, using dialogue examples to introduce sentence patterns for the lesson. The topics are set against the backdrop of international student life, illustrated with visuals, aiming to help students understand Japanese customs and culture while expanding their knowledge.
4. "Short Essays" provide integrated learning of sentence patterns and topics, cultivating students' reading comprehension and language application skills.
5. "Sentence Pattern Explanations" use Japan's current new grammar system for Japanese education, summarizing and explaining grammatical phenomena in the lesson through numerous examples and charts.
6. "Sentence Pattern Exercises" reinforce learned grammar knowledge through various forms of questions and dialogues.
7. "Rest Park" introduces Japanese songs, proverbs, riddles, and customs in format to enhance learners' interest.
8. "Daily Phrases and Conversations" introduce common greetings and brief dialogues used in daily life.
9. An appendix titled Basic Phrases and Conversations includes comprehensive language skill tests covering listening comprehension, vocabulary, fill-in-the-blanks, Japanese-Chinese translation, and reading comprehension.