Japanese Online has three major segments off the home page menu: Language Lessons, Bulletin Board, and Math Lessons. The Language Lessons section “teaches Japan’s language and culture through the experiences of an expatriate family newly transferred to Tokyo. Learning is based on serialized lessons showing everyday experiences of a high school senior, Jason Miller, and his parents from Seattle, Washington. As Jason and his parents meet new friends, neighbors, teachers, and business associates, viewers receive more information about life, culture, and Japan’s history.” This program’s lessons are by Dr Suguru Akutsu, Associate Professor of Modern Languages at the American Graduate School of International Management (Thunderbird) in Glendale, AZ.
At the time of this review, the site included thirteen lessons. (Since I started this review the 13th lesson was added and the site creators ask visitors to return to the site every few weeks for an additional lesson.) Each lesson has a number of parts: the first is dialogue text in Japanese (lessons 1‐5 in romanized Japanese and lessons 6‐13 in Hiragana) accompanied by audio recitation of the dialogue; the second part is an English language text of the dialogue. The third portion focusses on vocabulary and includes an audio file to be used in pronunciation drills. The fourth portion of each lesson focusses on grammar and includes an explanatory text as well as an audio file. The final section provides cultural background information which helps the non‐Japanese understand the dialogue’s meaning. Your computer will need to support .wav files and have a sound card to hear the spoken dialogue and listen to the audio explanations of the vocabulary and grammar.
Besides the 13 lessons, two additional lessons focus on the Hiragana and Katakana forms of writing.
To view the site’s Japanese script in lessons 6 through 13 and future lessons requires a program to support display of the Japanese characters. The site authors recommend, for PCs with Windows, KanjiKIT (from the commercial supporter of this site) although either Internet Explorer 3.0, by Microsoft with the international extensions for Japanese, or Shodouka, by Mediator Technologies, Inc. will also work. For the Macintosh, either the Japanese Language Kit by Apple Computer or Elixir by Hao Li and Electro will work.
The second portion of the site is a Bulletin Board where users of the site can communicate with one another. On August 27, there were five bulletin board “pages” of some 150 messages. Many of the messages seek a pen pal or someone to help with a particular Japanese language problem. To use the Bulletin Board, a user must register and the name and region (of the world) will display along with the date, topic category, and subject for each message. The Bulletin Board service provides a quick email utility to respond to the posted messages.
The third segment of the site, Math Lessons, provides a series of mathematics word problems. They are story problems translated from Japan’s junior high school mathematics placement tests into English. Problems include hints, explanations, and sound files. (“This test is given to 12‐year‐olds and each section of the full test consists of 225 story problems. Students are given a time limit for each problem ranging from one to five minutes. If completed within the time provided, the 225 story problems require over eight hours to complete.”) The problems are logic‐based and consist of about 20 different types of story problems.
The purpose of this part of the site is to “begin providing quality math content based on world standards. The Japanese continue to place among the top three countries worldwide in terms of their students’ math abilities. The US was recently ranked number 14 in the international math placement. We think that US students should be exposed to international level math content and this site represents the first step.”
This is a well constructed site which provides material for self‐directed learning of the Japanese language. The content is introductory and, unless substantial increases in the amount of material occur, the site will remain at the introductory level. Nevertheless this is an excellent site for the beginning student of the Japanese language.
