午夜剧场

The Center for Japanese Studies provides opportunities for many international students to learn Japanese. While students range from beginner to advanced levels, many of those currently at the beginner level aspire to eventually acquire high-level proficiency for use in research or their careers. Furthermore, for these students, Japanese is not merely a cultural pursuit but an essential tool for living and studying in Japan. Therefore, education must simultaneously provide a foundation for the future and cultivate immediate skills that can be used right away.

In the foreign language education reform movement that occurred in Europe during the late 19th century, the traditional grammar-translation method was criticized, and the direct method—which teaches only in the target language without using a medium language and emphasizes phonetics—was proposed. While many theories follow this trend, the Oral Method introduced by H. E. Palmer, who came to Japan in 1922, had a particularly significant impact on Japanese language education. In this teaching method, the initial stages of learning do not rely on written characters; instead, training is conducted to directly link the sounds of words with their concepts through the repetition of listening and speaking. Example sentences are presented using pictures or actions within specific contexts, and grammatical explanations are kept to a minimum. For example, even with the first sentence taught, "Watashi wa Tanaka desu" (I am Tanaka), the teacher does not explain the semantic functions of "wa" or "desu." By pointing to themselves and using a name tag, the teacher lets the students infer what is being said and has them imitate the introduction. From subsequent sentences with the same structure, such as "Kore wa hon desu" (This is a book) or "Soko wa kyoshitsu desu" (That is a classroom), students inductively understand that the structural pattern "~ wa ~ desu" functions to connect the subject and the predicate.

Some argue that this way of teaching is inefficient. However, if professional teachers who understand the philosophy and educational techniques of the direct method conduct classes based on carefully prepared lesson plans, they can devote more time to speaking practice instead of spending time on detailed grammatical explanations, making it quite efficient. Furthermore, through practicing the use of structural patterns for sentences with various functions, students can master the art of instantly verbalizing their intended expressions by adding vocabulary to the framework of the sentence. Flexible young people quickly adapt to this method and come to enjoy the practice. After one semester of intensive study, even beginners will have no trouble with basic daily conversation and can move on to learning written language. Listening to the Japanese that is the fruit of the international students' daily efforts, and making an effort to speak in Japanese that is easy for them to understand, is perhaps another form of international exchange.