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Ivan Zimmer
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Quote Ivan Zimmer Replybullet Posted: 30 July 2008 at 11:37am
Actually, all materials should be welcome. Older materials have historical value and will also help students deal with written language. For anyone seriously studying a language, older language materials give clues as how to language develops and how the teaching methodologies of languages have evolved. Furthermore, language materials are basically neutral. The language of which you speak that changes so quickly are generally slang and technological/socio-political terms. Those items are usually not expressed in textbooks but can be learned through interaction with native speakers and reading newspapers and popular literature.

Personally, I would be overjoyed to see more Jpanese language learning content, old or otherwise.Star
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regd
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Quote regd Replybullet Posted: 07 August 2008 at 8:11pm
Interesting as a discussion starter, but the premise behind it is foolish. Yes, the Japanese language (like many languages) has added words over the last 30 years. But the basics -- words for many common objects or things like food, and basic verbs and more -- have definitely not changed.

The information in the FSI Japanese course will give you a good start in the language. Any new words/concepts you can learn. But without the basics, all that new stuff is pretty much useless.
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mspxlation
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Quote mspxlation Replybullet Posted: 08 August 2008 at 11:39pm
It's not that the Japanese language has changed more than other languages.
The reason that young Japanese have trouble reading literature from before 1900 is that until World War II, a lot of literature was written in classical Japanese or an approximation of it. Imagine if all English-speaking authors wrote in Chaucerian English till 1945. That's sort of what happened in Japan. The written language and the spoken language were pretty far apart.

My point about the FSI Japanese course is that it's the 1962 Jorden/Chaplin book, Beginning Japanese. I'm not sure that even the FSI is using it anymore. If you'd use the vocabulary in it in Japan, you'd sound like someone saying, "I'm listening to some music on the Victrola and drinking a beer from the ice box." People would understand you, but you'd sound as if you'd stepped out of a time warp.

Some of the usages in the Jorden book are now considered offensive, such as calling a maid a jochuu, and some of the situations are obsolete, such as overloading your household electrical system by watching TV and having lamps on at the same time.

Jorden's more recent book, written with Mari Noda, Japanese: the Spoken Language (JSL) is much more up-to-date, although its grammar explanations can be confusing. The grammar explanations in the earlier book are better, but the dialogues and listening exercises in the newer book are extremely natural. Not many Japanese textbooks offer listening exercises at normal speed.

 I once had a native speaker of Japanese listen to a tape of a dialogue about ordering home delivery of food, and she asked, "Did they get that by bugging the restaurant's phone?" After teaching out of that book, I took a trip to Japan and tried to call a friend at her office. As I talked to the switchboard operator, I suddenly realized that I was doing one of the dialogues from JSL almost verbatim.

Jorden's Reading Japanese teaches some obsolete written forms, especially using kanji in places where most people now use kana, but its teaching method makes learning kanji almost effortless. It teaches 450 kanji, and when I was a student, I used to wish that there were 4 volumes of it so that I could learn all the joyo kanji that way.

If you use Beginning Japanese, be sure to supplement it with something that has more up-to-date vocabulary. Also, be aware that people don't say things like mada tabemasen for "I haven't eaten yet." They say, mada tabete imasen. I no longer have a copy of the book, but if I did, I could go through it mark some of the linguistic and cultural changes.
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toivo
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Quote toivo Replybullet Posted: 22 August 2008 at 1:51pm
日本語教育論集 世界の日本語教育
 
Japanese language education (collected papers)
Japanese language education worldwide
 
 
There are .pdf versions of the papers starting with #13.
 
An excellent resource, if the few papers I've had a look at are anything to go by.
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oldlang2003
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Quote oldlang2003 Replybullet Posted: 11 September 2008 at 6:34pm
Well put, reqd.
 
I'm always amused by the occasional posts lamenting the 'dated-ness' of the FSI material.  Sure, there are utterances that might sound a little stilted now, but I'd guess that 90% / 95% of the strangeness is lexical, not grammatical.
 
Let me list a few movies that most will remember:
Star Wars (1977)
Rocky (1976)
Jaws (1975)
 
If I were a foreigner learning English today , I'd LOVE to be able to express myself as well as the actors and actresses in those films.  People watch those films without comment; no one turns to their partner and says, "Wow...they sure talked funny back then!"
 
The basic structures of English have not changed dramatically in several hundred years.  We still use a Subject - Verb - Object word order, for example.  And adjectives still generally precede nouns.  Fill the slots of these basic patterns with the nouns and verbs and pronouns of your choice, and you'll end up with a grammatical utterance, whether it's:
 
"Lord Elgin's coachman insulted the cheeky chimneysweep.", or
"Britney Spears slapped the poor cameraman."
 
Different words, same structure.
 
So I wouldn't get hung up with the stray anachronism.  Learn (and overlearn!) the basic patterns of the language, and you'll be able to 'plug in' whatever you want to talk about.
 
Two last points:
1.  Not everyone you speak to is going to be a 20-something.  Your boss, or your boss' colleague, or someone you'll want to impress probably grew up in the 60s and 70s, and they'll find nothing wrong with your speech.
 
2.  Yes, you may sound a little more formal, or a little more polite, than most people your age.  But that's not a bad thing.  Some people will appreciate it.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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schmev123
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Quote schmev123 Replybullet Posted: 11 September 2008 at 9:19pm
I have the Japanese I and II courses.  I'd be afraid to scan because I think the copyright laws for this course are different.  If anybody wants to borrow it, we can discuss.
 
regards,
 
Evan
 
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