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Help in starting a Japanese club


Sonic Whammy

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Man, it's been too long since I've been here. Well, I had my reasons, but that's for another time.

Anyway, I find myself in a very interesting position, potentially. With all my years doing game shows on the anime con circuit, I was striking up some interest here and there with some of the students where I teach. On top of that, we started an exchange program with the Japan Society of New York where we've hosted Japanese students in March each year, and I took over the program last year.

So in the meantime, enough of a circle was developing that a couple years ago, I, along with a few students, put together a proposal for a Japanese Culture Club. And now, this year, it was finally put in the new teacher contract, specifically for me to run it (the teachers on the negotiation board knew it was my thing). The job posting is now active, I've applied, and I've been asked to have a meeting with one of the administrators tomorrow.

And it's at this point that I see a small problem: I'm not totally sure exactly WHAT I want this club to accomplish.

In my time going to cons, I've tried to observe other activities here and there beyond the simple things like anime and cosplay and stuff. But I'd hardly call myself an expert in the subject, even if I'm more qualified than any other teacher in the school. So, I know I have some research to do, but I could use some help on just what to actually research. This is where I turn to you guys.

If you were part of such a club, what would you want to see happen in it? Or, if you were ever actually IN such a club in high school or college, what did you do in it? I want to get as many suggestions as possible to be able to make a good pitch tomorrow. If anyone here has any advice, I would greatly appreciate it.

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If I'd ever joined a Japanese club, I'd definitely have wanted to start learning the language, at least becoming comfortable with reading and writing kana. Kanji seems to be a brick wall generally, and I'm guessing you don't want the club too focused on any one aspect. 

 In my community college class we didn't have much focus on culture, but we would watch some of the Begin Japanology series which seems like a good introduction to the culture.

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5 hours ago, Sonic Whammy said:

Man, it's been too long since I've been here. Well, I had my reasons, but that's for another time.

Anyway, I find myself in a very interesting position, potentially. With all my years doing game shows on the anime con circuit, I was striking up some interest here and there with some of the students where I teach. On top of that, we started an exchange program with the Japan Society of New York where we've hosted Japanese students in March each year, and I took over the program last year.

So in the meantime, enough of a circle was developing that a couple years ago, I, along with a few students, put together a proposal for a Japanese Culture Club. And now, this year, it was finally put in the new teacher contract, specifically for me to run it (the teachers on the negotiation board knew it was my thing). The job posting is now active, I've applied, and I've been asked to have a meeting with one of the administrators tomorrow.

And it's at this point that I see a small problem: I'm not totally sure exactly WHAT I want this club to accomplish.

In my time going to cons, I've tried to observe other activities here and there beyond the simple things like anime and cosplay and stuff. But I'd hardly call myself an expert in the subject, even if I'm more qualified than any other teacher in the school. So, I know I have some research to do, but I could use some help on just what to actually research. This is where I turn to you guys.

If you were part of such a club, what would you want to see happen in it? Or, if you were ever actually IN such a club in high school or college, what did you do in it? I want to get as many suggestions as possible to be able to make a good pitch tomorrow. If anyone here has any advice, I would greatly appreciate it.

Sup Sonic, 

Maybe you could make and eat Japanese food, learn a few words or enough to say a few sentences or Try Japanese calligraphy... Just a few ideas I have, but Ill keep thinking.

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What ages are the students you're dealing with?   FWIW, the closest I ever came to anything that could be considered "official" Japanese education was when I was in elementary school.  I think it was in 1st or second grade they had a sort of immersion program where for 2 weeks a guest teacher(? might have been just a native) from a particular culture would come in and we'd do activities related to that culture for the entire 2-week period.  We'd sing songs in the language, do crafts, learn to speak the language, the clothing, and a bit of the history and culture.  Even stuff like math was done using the "guest" language.  At least as much as possible.

Again, this was only for two weeks at around age 7 so it was quite limited in scope, but kids that age are information sponges if properly motivated and this was a lot of fun, at least for me.  My next attempt at learning the language wasn't until I was nearly 40 and I was surprised at what I remembered from those couple weeks.  Unfortunately it wasn't enough time to get into the written language, especially the kanji.  Native Japanese students learn several kanji per week over their entire school life, and 1st/2nd graders are often still learning hirogana.  Kanji is a subject you can get a masters degree in.  No way is it possible to even scratch the surface in only 2 weeks at an early grade-school level.  We were presented with the kana & kanji for common things like "dog" (いぬ/犬), "cat" (ねこ,/猫), "person" (ひと/人), etc., but most of the usage in class was spoken, with reading optional and limited.  Still, even 30 years later I found (re)learning to read kana was relatively easy.  I still can't write it though, and kanji is a learning cliff that I'll probably never be able to justify the time it'd take to become proficient.

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This is a high school club, so the students I will be working with are in the 14-18 range. And yes, I want to be able to delve a little into several categories within the culture. The writing and calligraphy was definitely one thing, I was thinking about starting with having us all translate our names and write them out in Japanese (QQ: ARE Japanese letter/words/characters and calligraphy the same or is there a visual difference? I'm not familiar with all the terms.), then somewhere along the way explore other things like food (maybe get the culinary department in on that). Of course, we'd discuss some anime, games and con stuff which is what brought us together in the first place, but I don't want this to naturally be just for that, I want there to be some educational purpose.

Given that this year, the club won't start for another few weeks, and we'll only have til June to do things, this is going to be a great time to figure these things out and get the kinks ironed out, then expand upon them for next year. So please, keep those suggestions coming!

UPDATE (As of 2PM): The club is mine. Once our next board meeting on the 11th goes down to officially stamp my name on it, I can start recruiting immediately. But yes, keep giving advice and ideas.

Edited by Sonic Whammy
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9 hours ago, Sonic Whammy said:

ARE Japanese letter/words/characters and calligraphy the same or is there a visual difference?

Oh boy.  Japanese kana uses a syllabary rather than an alphabet.  There are 40 official symbols/syllables in the kana, and Japanese doesn't use some of our sounds so there's not really a direct correlation with our ("English") alphabet.  (For example, there are no "V" or "Th" sounds in Japanese, and there is no distinction between "R" and "L" sounds.)  There's 2 versions of the syllabary however.  Hiragana, which is used for native Japanese words, and Katakana, which is used for foreign words, including names.  Written Japanese uses Katakana kind of like we use italics for French or Italian words.  The two syllabarys are basically the same (in theory) but the differences between the symbols are more extreme than between normal and italics in our text.  Also, there tend to be more extensions to the katakana since foreign words have a lot of sounds that spoken Japanese does not.

If that's all there was then learning Japanese would be easy!  The thing that kills me wrt written Japanese however is the kanji.  A kanji character like 猫 has one or more "readings", or corresponding kana translation(s).  In this case the kana/reading would be "ねこ", which are the syllables "ne" and "ko".  "Neko" is the Japanese word for "cat".  I can sight-read the kana pretty well, but anything containing kanji beyond gradeschool level is beyond me.  There might be only 40 syllables in the Japanese language, but there's over 100 kanji in the "N5" (lowest) level of the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test), and each kanji character can represent any of several Japanese words, depending on context.  At "N1" (highest) there's over 2000 kanji, each with several "readings"!

I'm not really the one to teach this sort of thing though so I'll stop there.  I've dabbled in it a bit and have an interest, but for further research I'd suggest you look into that JLPT, above, and see how far down that rabbit hole you would like to go.  The kana is easy.  You can get up to speed on 40 syllables with a deck of flash cards in no time.  Basic kanji isn't too much harder, but to get even to highschool-level reading ability might require several hundred hours of study.

Edited by efaardvark
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