This study guide to HSC Japanese offers a comprehensive coverage for the entire course from year 11. Includes seven main themes and over 100 pages of HSC type questions.

This Workbook has been specifically written to accompany the Course B ook - A First Course in Japanese. This course is designed for senior hig h school students who are beginning their study of Japanese in the last two years of high school. It contains Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji readi ng and writing practice, as well as grammatical exercises, composition, reading and listening comprehension, and crosswords. Two audio CD s cover all the listening exercises. The complete script of the CDs is a lso included in the book. Hiragana and KatakanaIt is desirable for students to learn Hiragana and Katakana before they commence using the Course Book. However, it is possible for teacher s to conduct lessons orally while students acquire Hiragana and Katakana reading skills. Kanji There are 79 Kanji f or reading and writing, ten recognition compounds and four single recogn ition Kanji used for this course. About six Kanji are introduced in each unit, and reading and writing practice is provided at the beginning of each unit. Stroke orders are given on pages 341-345 of the Course Book. Wonderword and crossword Students will hav e fun finding words in the Wonderwords or solving crossword puzzles. Grammatical exercises and writing, reading and responding Exercises for required grammar and writing practice on Genkoyoshi are given. Reading comprehension At the end of each topic, some comprehen sion passages are given for students to test their reading comprehension skills. Listening comprehension At the end of each unit, listening comprehension is given. The C D script for the listening is given at the end of the Workbook. Each ite m is read twice with a five second pause. Students will have to stop the CD to write their answers. Speaking Quest ions are given at the end of each topic in the Course Book. However, the Workbook also provides exercises for speaking.

A First Course in Japanese (2007 Edition) has been written specifical ly for students who are beginning their study of Japanese in the last tw o years of high school. The textbook is based on the new syllabus publis hed in 2006 and covers two years of study. It has three resources : the Course Book is based around six main topics. Each top ic has a number of units. Each unit begins with sentence structures foll owed by explanations of the structures. This is then followed by various texts, a grammar summary, Kanji, activities, cultural notes, vocabulary and remember of pictorial charts. the Workbook contains gramma tical exercises, listening, comprehension, composition and Kanji writing exercises. the CDs: the CD that comes with the Course Book cov ers all the sentence structures and dialogues. The Workbook CD covers al l the listening exercises, text and questions.

Following the first volume of Remembering the Kanji, the present work provides students with helpful tools for learning the pronunciation of the kanji. Behind the notorious inconsistencies in the way the Japanese language has come to pronounce the characters it received from China lie several coherent patterns. Identifying these patterns and arranging them in logical order can reduce dramatically the amount of time spent in the brute memorization of sounds unrelated to written forms. Many of the “primitive elements,” or building blocks, used in the drawing of the characters also serve to indicate the “Chinese reading” that particular kanji use, chiefly in compound terms. By learning one of the kanji that uses such a “signal primitive,” one can learn the entire group at the same time. In this way, Remembering the Kanji 2 lays out the varieties of phonetic pattern and offers helpful hints for learning readings, that might otherwise appear completely random, in an efficient and rational way. Individual frames cross-reference the kanji to alternate readings and to the frame in volume 1 in which the meaning and writing of the kanji was first introduced. A parallel system of pronouncing the kanji, their “Japanese readings,” uses native Japanese words assigned to particular Chinese characters. Although these are more easily learned because of the association of the meaning to a single word, the author creates a kind of phonetic alphabet of single syllable words, each connected to a simple Japanese word, and shows how they can be combined to help memorize particularly troublesome vocabulary. The 4th edition has been updated to include the 196 new kanji approved by the government in 2010 as “general-use” kanji.

This profile surveys all levels of Japanese learning in Australia and presents a number of recommendations for improving it. Convinced that it is important to promote the study of Japanese language the profile recommends the development of cultural/language studies rather than narrow language teaching.