Language Classes Update #5

For the last class and the upcoming class (which is over a week from now), we’re going over homework worksheets in class. Last time, there were just a few exercises, but I still managed to make a mistake or two (one was debatable, because we did manage to come up with an explanation for the slightly unexpected sentence).

While writing up the homework assignment for the next class, I tried to maintain a balance of grammatical forms, to keep them equally fresh in the students’ minds. Some of the sentences are to be translated from Japanese, some into Japanese; some of them use the distal form, some the direct form; the vocabulary words used are picked from as many different sets of vocabulary as possible: some are colors, some have to do with shopping, some have to do with the weather; some time expressions refer to the date, some refer to the day of the week, some refer to the time of day, etc; so on and so forth. Where possible, I tended towards the more frequently used or irregular vocabulary or measure words, to really emphasize those.

It’s an interesting process, writing worksheets like this, because I get to think about the sizable amount of knowledge that we’ve covered. And yet at the same time, I did have to revise the sentences that came to mind every now and then because they did, in fact, contain grammatical structures or vocabulary that we haven’t covered yet.

Both last time and this time, I threw in a katakana loan word that we hadn’t covered in class, that the students get to sound out and figure out on their own, which I hope adds some entertainment value and a sense of accomplishment in figuring out vocabulary words without having to be taught them or look them up.

Last class session, the students said that going over the worksheet was very useful, and possibly more useful than just the class sessions we’ve had so far where we’ve covered conversations and the grammar and vocabulary contained within, probably because we get to really think about the structure of the sentences instead of just going along with precomposed constructs. If anyone has more suggestions or feedback on what else might be useful to really solidify concepts that students have previously been exposed to, I’d be glad to hear it.