Japanese (Beginners Course)

Travelling to Japan? Love Japanese food, movies and anime? Going skiing in Japan? Learn essential vocabulary and effective communication tips to enjoy your visit to Japan. This course will help you to appreciate the language and culture even more.

Course fees

This course offers a course fee subsidy through funding from the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) for NZ citizen and permanent migrant adults, their partners on work visas or visitor visas, and refugees. To qualify, registrants should be over the age of 16 years and not currently enrolled in a secondary school.

We need to collect extra information such as age, ethnicity, educational achievement and gender for statistical purposes. You must also provide evidence of NZ citizenship, residency or refugee status if requested. A condition of accepting a course fee subsidy is that you commit to at least 80% attendance of your course.

About the course

This course has a focus on oral communication rather than the written language. Japanese will be taught in Romaji (the alphabet). Situations include greetings, shopping, dining out, and asking directions.  Each week, new vocabulary will be added. There will be lots of speaking exercises and practise to develop your confidence with spoken Japanese.

On completion of this course you will be able to:

• count in Japanese from 0 to 100,000,000.
• introduce yourself appropriately
• order food and drink
• ask about prices and say the time
• better understand and discuss aspects of Japanese language and culture  e.g. bowing

There will be minimal or no homework usually. In the second level class, the teacher will begin to introduce some Japanese characters such as Hirigana, Katakana and Kanji.

Prerequisites

This course is for adults learning Japanese for the first time.  No prior Japanese language is required.