It centers around practice of conversations on the topics that are relevant and meaningful to college students' everyday life. The course aims at the development of communication skills in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Attention is also given to develop the students' knowledge and understanding of the Japanese people and their culture. The class time is mainly devoted to the development of listening and speaking skills. A typical class starts with the presentation of new materials, practice of the materials presented, and student presentation of the materials learned.
Homework is given in forms of reading and writing assignments on the materials introduced in class.
All the hiragana, and katakana syllabaries are introduced in this course. In addition approximately 100 kanji characters are introduced. The students are encouraged to use a Japanese word processor which can be downloaded freely from Internet for writing assignment. Preparation before class and review after class are integral parts of the course. The students are requested to check with a weekly schedule to be familiarized with what is scheduled for each class period as well as what is needed to be done before and after class.