User talk:Elaeum/Testbed/Japanese/Retropunk/Lesson1

=Modifications=

Overall this is a really solid lesson. I really enjoyed reading it. There were only a few minor modifications necessary, and then a few that I thought would supplement the lesson. I put them here because I didn't know if it was all right making such large changes to you're user page. Let me know what you think, and hopefully we can work to incorporate some version of this lesson to the lessons section of the book! I still think it could use a bit more polishing, I'll do more with it tomorrow.

Conversation
This is an excellent beginning conversation. I noticed that you did not use a topic particle anywhere. This is a good thing as something so confusing can wait until the second lesson! I simply added the 日本語 and English labels.

Vocabulary
I added the romaji readings for each of the words. I very much agree with you that Japanese should not be taught in romaji, but I thought it might be nice for the first few lessons. After that, the reader should be weaned off of roman text as much as possible.

I also added a few more basic greeting phrases, as they seem to be fitting. The book that I learned Japanese out of (The Genki series) starts off at about 30 words per chapter. This may be slightly excessive, but any fewer than 20 and a lot of lessons are going to be needed to teach a basic vocabulary.

I formatted the expressions a little, nothing major.

Grammar
I modified a few errors, and added a new example table. Not many modifications. The last sentence of the Asking Questions section is a little unclear in my opinion, but I haven't been able to figure out how to modify it yet.

I removed the last two honorifics, as they are probably not needed to be taught quite this early.

Excellent explanation on the copula by the way. I removed the sentence about the verbs of being in Japanese - this may be a little ahead of this lesson yet. I fixed the conjugation table from "Past" and "Non-Past" to "Affirmative" and "Negative".

I removed the section on predicates, as there were no examples of the 「は」particle in the dialog, and when predicates are explained a lengthy paragraph on Topics will be needed too. As such, this topic seemed like it would better fit in Lesson 2.

Quick Explanations
Nothing Much Done here.

=Todo= I'd like to add some more Japanese example sentences, both to illustrate points and to familiarize the reader with Japanese. The lesson could also use some more polishing to make it clearer, and more aesthetically pleasing.