So I’m the president of the Japanese Language society at my university, and as such I teach Japanese lessons most weeks. Our general goal for the year is to get people to N5 level Japanese. Since we have new members each year its difficult to aim above that so I usually only have to teach up to that level. As a part of a mid year feedback session, my students mentioned they want a vocab specific lesson. Now vocab is super boring so I know if I just go ahead and spit vocab at them I will just bore them to death. I usually sprinkle in the relevant vocab in every week and use it in sessions when I introduce a new concept/ topic, so I’m not entirely sure how to make learning vocab in a classroom environment fun. So far I have created a hangman game with part of the N5 vocab list. I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions for how to make learning vocab interesting and fun, or anyone who has been in a lesson where a teacher managed this please share your story.
I want to point out I am not a qualified teacher and I have no official training (although I have been taught how to teach by a certified EAL teacher) and I am by no means good at Japanese, I’m just good at explaining concepts in a fun and digestible manner.
2 comments
I feel reading stories is a great way to build vocab and see the words you are learning in action.
At pre-N5 you aren’t gonna get the most interesting stories. But you can look at some graded readers for inspiration and go with something like that.
Honestly a lot of vocab in books like Genki or Tobira comes down to memorizing some list. It’s not that hard to do but it’s not fun.
I think what I did for myself and daughter could work for you. Pick out very simple stories/songs, extract the vocab to teach and end the lesson with a reading/listening. My toddler also loves learning with me and we break down vocab per song and it just naturally sticks once we actually enjoy the song.
The last song we did was a children’s song about going for a walk and just in that song we learned cool vocab for various kinds of trails/roads/paths.