Japanese

It is with great excitement that Preshil has launched a Japanese language program for Years 7 and 8, expanding our horizons towards Asia!

Given Australia’s geographical position, and our increasingly important role as a middle power within the Asia region, exposure to Asian languages and cultures is incredibly beneficial for our young people. Japan is still the world's third largest economy after the US and China and a key strategic partner for Australia. 

Furthermore, Japanese is a great match for our school. Many students are interested in manga (Japanese comics) and anime (Japanese animations) and already know a lot about Japanese culture.

In Years 7 and 8, we’ve begun studying the first of three alphabets, called hiragana. Our trusty friend, the samurai Morimoto-san, has been up to all kinds of high-jinx around the senior campus, allowing us to create a dramatic story about his exploits, based around well-known physical landmarks. This technique, called a memory palace, was common across all preliterate cultures, as a means to memorising large amounts of information, and is assisting students to memorise the 46 hiragana characters.

We have also been working on spoken introductions and greetings and common classroom commands. As part of our cultural inquiry, we discovered that the average department store worker in Japan will bow 665,600 times in one year whilst at work!

The remainder of the term will encompass Japanese counting systems and the introduction of basic kanji characters for numbers, exploring language and grammar to describe our families, and beginning to talk about likes and dislikes – all focused on giving students a voice to describe their own world.

We are very lucky that, as an IB school, Preshil recognises the importance of global education and values foreign languages so deeply. Our timetable supports language acquisition with regular, short classes across the week. We look forward to continuing this Japanese language adventure together!

Julia Madden

Teacher of Japanese

julia.madden@preshil.vic.edu.au