From: sbarta@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Scott E Barta)
Subject: Jorden System
Organization: The Ohio State University
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1992 00:01:04 GMT

Last spring I finished my first year of Japanese at Ohio State (curent home of
Mari Noda) using, as one would expect, the Jorden System.  My experiences are 
probably as close as any to the way the system is "supposed" to be taught.  I 
haven't looked at other textbooks, but I thought I'd throw in my two yen worth
for JSL:

In the first year, we got most of the way through the first volume of JSL,
around chapter 10 or so.  While it didn't seem like the class went too slow by 
any means, I think I was frustrated by how little I seemed to have learned.  I 
know that it's difficult to teach because all of the grammatical structures are
different than English, but I still feel that I have little to show for a lot 
of work.  Perhaps the area where this really shows is vocabulary.  After a year
on the straight Jorden system, I have a vocab of only about 500 words (!)

Most students I talked to strongly disliked the idea of the memorized Core 
Conversations.  The way our class was run, every day we'd have to have one 
memorized (two if they were short).  The instructor would take the entire class
(about 12 students) through, splitting them in pairs and having everyone act 
out the CC.  Everyone went twice: one for each part of the CC.  You can imagine
that it would get quite boring waiting for everyone else to finish.

Most students didn't like the memorized conversations because it adds the extra
dimension of stage fright to learning the language: some otherwise competent 
people would be reduced to stuttering basket cases when it came time to 
perform.  Probably the first time I go to Japan it will take me a couple of 
weeks to get over the nervousness I associate with speaking Japanese.

However, I generally liked the memorized conversations, because it gives the 
instructor a place to start with a language which I feel is difficult to teach 
in as structured a format as other languages.  If the student works at the 
conversation, he or she can perform it well in class and have something to hang
his hat on for the rest of the lesson.

I was very frustrated with the way the written language was taught.  In the 
first class out of three for the first hear, we only learned katakana; in the 
second class, he learned only hiragana.  In the third, we learned about 20 to 
30 kanji.  I feel that this is painfully slow, considering what I will need to 
know to be considered marginally literate.  I was also very frustrated with the
field-test version of JWL we used: it was very poor, and had no explanatory 
material whatsoever.  By and large, little explanation was given in class to 
supplement JWL.

My last gripe about JSL is the common complaint about the exclusive use of 
romanization.  For the life of me, I can't figure out why Jorden didn't use 
kana for all of the Japanese text (except perhaps to save typesetting costs???)
Doing so would do wonders for my kana reading abilities, which are about 
kindergarten level at best.  I am good at reading romanization, though.

--Scott Barta
--sbarta@magnusug.acs.ohio-state.edu