Congratulations on making it this far, it wasn’t easy and it wasn’t
terribly difficult either. By now you have developed your Japanese
fundamentals so well that anything you learn from here on out will
be a walk in the park.
While it would be impractical to count all the way to 999.99
quadrillion in Japanese, you know how to count that far in
theory.
You also know some of the history behind Japanese numbers, kanji,
and Japan in general as well as various Japanese superstitions,
traditions, and have caught a glimpse on their way of life.
You should now know approximately 12 words, 2 particles, 1 copula,
all of hiragana, 16 kanji, and to top it all off you also know
certain greetings, sayings, and the logic behind various
things.
You are certainly on a path to mastering Japanese in just a matter
of months rather than years at this rate and it won’t be long
before you can speak basic Japanese with others in our
chat,
forums, and other
social aspects of the site like
Club
Jappleng and
J-Spot Social.
But more importantly you are
almost ready to go to Japan
prepared for anything. However, in order to be fully prepared to go
to Japan, you will have to complete Chapters 2 and 3. But before we
move on to the next chapter, let's make sure that you fully
understood the content that was previously learned. Let’s do a
quick review and then we can proceed to Chapter 2.
In this preface, we learned about Jappleng, the JPLearn! program
and how to accept and complete the assignments.
Lesson Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/study/1/jplearn/lesson/483/welcome-to-jplearn
Assignment Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/homework/1/jplearn/1
In this lesson, we had gone over a brief history of Japan and the
Japanese language, explored a bit about the three writing
styles.
Lesson Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/study/1/jplearn/lesson/245/introduction-to-japanese
Assignment Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/homework/1/jplearn/2
In this lesson, we had practice all of the Japanese pronunciations
so that you would know how to pronounce the words that you learn.
Be sure to download the sound files (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) to
your MP3 player. Notice, each file is in ogg format, an open source
format that may not be entirely compatible with every MP3
player.
Lesson Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/study/1/jplearn/lesson/246/japanese-pronunciations
We used what we have learned in the pronunciation guide by learning
our first greetings and also attempted to dissect some words for a
better understanding on how some words are created.
Lesson Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/study/1/jplearn/lesson/247/introduction-to-japanese-greetings
Assignment Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/homework/1/jplearn/3
We set the pace a little stronger by introducing Hiragana. We
learned the stroke order, the vowels and ‘k’ column. The homework
assignment taught many new words including あお, あおい, いいえ , and
others. We understood that in this lesson that learning Japanese
without knowing how to read and write in Hiragana is a silly
process and should be avoided at all cost.
Lesson Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/study/1/jplearn/lesson/251/japanese-stroke-order-and-hiragana
Assignment Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/jplearn/homework/251/japanese-stroke-order-and-hiragana
In this lesson we discovered the great joys of the Japanese
honorifics. How do you say Mr. or Mrs.? How do you say Teacher or
Professor? How do you talk to your boss and so forth… There are a
lot of different honorifics and we learned the most common ones as
what we deemed “Beginner” honorifics”. We also learned some new
words and the hiragana columns ‘T’ and ’S’.
Lesson Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/study/1/jplearn/lesson/286/japanese-honorifics-beginner
Assignment Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/jplearn/homework/286/japanese-honorifics-beginner
Now we’re getting somewhere! We begin by introducing the concept of
a copula and particles. Then we proceed to learning how to say
“this and that” as well as topic markers.
Lesson Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/study/1/jplearn/lesson/306/this-and-that-in-japanese
Assignment Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/homework/1/jplearn/6
We take what we have learned and expand on it by asking questions
by adding "ka" at the end of a sentence. We also learned here about
Dakuten, and Handakuten.
Lesson Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/study/1/jplearn/lesson/613/asking-questions-in-japanese
Assignment Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/homework/1/jplearn/18
Because we are about to be exposed to some kanji in the numbers
lessons, we need to learn a bit about kanji first. We set out to do
just this in this lesson as we go over the history of Kanji, and
how it came to be. After learning about Kanji, hiragana columns ‘N’
and ‘H’ were learned.
Lesson Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/study/1/jplearn/lesson/369/introduction-to-japanese-kanji-history
Assignment Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/homework/1/jplearn/7
Now that we understand the history about kanji, we may now expand
our knowledge into the realm of writing them. Kanji are essential
in Japan and there are simply too many of them to memorize them
like they do in Japan so we talked about a little trick about
Radicals to help speed up the process.
While radicals won’t be formally introduced until later in Chapter
2, we get a glimpse on how kanji are structured. This is important
because in JPL-B011 we begin to learn our first set of kanji with
numbers. In this lesson we also learned hiragana columns ‘M’, ‘Y’,
‘B’, and ‘P’.
Lesson Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/study/1/jplearn/lesson/370/kanji-stroke-order-radicals-easy-way
Assignment Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/homework/1/jplearn/8
The basic numbers 0 through 9 were taught in this lesson which also
included double-meanings to some words, superstitions, and how to
count using fingers the Japanese way. We also learn how to count up
to 5 using kanji and introduced the Japanese character ‘n’.
Lesson Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/study/1/jplearn/lesson/460/counting-in-japanese-0-to-9
Assignment Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/homework/1/jplearn/9
We get a little more complex by learning how to count from 10 to 99
in Japanese and while it may be more complex, it is not terribly
difficult after learning the logic behind numbers. Numbers 1-99 can
now be written in kanji from this lesson.
Lesson Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/study/1/jplearn/lesson/461/counting-in-japanese-10-99
Assignment Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/homework/1/jplearn/10
Finalizing the counting segment in learning how to count in
Japanese; we learn how to count up to a quadrillion but it’s up to
you to decide how high you really want to count. We recommend to
know at least the thousands for the upcoming lessons.
Lesson Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/study/1/jplearn/lesson/462/counting-in-japanese-100-to-quadrillion
Assignment Link:
https://www.jappleng.com/education/course/homework/1/jplearn/11
When we complete our new education software, we’ll be able to
provide an exam to test your skills, but unfortunately it’s not yet
ready at this time. But what we have provided you is a checklist of
the many different things of what we have taught in an excel file
(equally in a pdf and word document).
If you do not have Microsoft Office to open the original documents,
you can drag and drop the files into Firefox or Chrome and it
should work natively; if it doesn’t, Open Office is a free
alternative as well as Google Docs.
When you are done with this chapter, you may proceed to the next
Chapter.
