Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Upon successful completion students should be able to:

1. Apply an understanding of the nature of tonal Japanese language in tone and pitch.
2. Exchange daily greetings and communicate in semi-predictable settings with appropriate vocabulary.
3. Apply common cultural understandings and recognize cultural values when interacting with native speakers of Japanese and authentic texts.
4. Use an understanding of basic Japanese syntactic system to read and compose simple colloquial Japanese texts in Japanese Kana
syllabaries and simple Kanji characters.

Students will be assessed by any combination of the following: 

1. Active participation in class

2. Individual presentations

3. Contextual written tasks (in or outside of class) to assess reading, writing, cultural, and aural competencies, as well as quizzes over syllabaries and Kanji

4. Oral interviews with partner or instructor

5. In class, interactive student role-plays

Includes all or most of the following: 

1. Interrogatives

2. Personal pronouns and demonstrative pronouns

3. Academic subjects and majors

4. Physical and personality descriptions

5. Numbers of native Japanese system, Sino-Japanese system and counters

6. Verbs in non-past, informal speech, affirmative

7. Positional words

8. Verbs in past, mid-level formal speech

9. Verbs in non-past, mid-level formal speech

10. Single particles

11. Predicate using the Copula, i-adjectives and na-adjectives

12. Verbs in gerund

13. Daily and weekend activities

14. Telephone conversations

15. Invitations in a culturally appropriate manner

16. Conjunctions and disjunctive conjunctions

Competencies and Skills 

1. Exchanges basic personal information using a few basic polite forms of noun.

2. Expresses existence for animate and inanimate objects and locations.

3. Discusses about community indicating locations.

4. Describes self and others: personality and physical attributes.

5. Makes statements about daily activities, and likes and dislikes

6. States date and extends an invitation.

7. Makes a telephone call in a culturally appropriate manner.

8. Recognizes basic linguistic and cultural differences between non-Indo-European and Indo-European worlds.

9. Writes lists and discrete sentences using syllabaries and 50 Kanji.

10. Reads for general meanings in texts using some cognates.

11. Recognizes tones and pitches that is specific to Japanese.

12. Writes sentences expressing sequential actions or events.