Our Japanese Curriculum: Loosely Assembled

Alina and I have been been doing a lot of studying these past few months (まいにち, たくさん べんきょうしています)[1], and I'd like to share some of the resources we've been using, as well as many that we've assembled ourselves. Most of this is stuff we've developed ourselves on our journey, but there are also a bunch of references to existing publications and websites.

• Jisho.org: Jisho is a powerful Japanese-English dictionary. This has come in quite handy for looking up words in English, romaji, and hiragana. Consult the sample searches before you begin, as this will make it more useful to you.
• Google translate: I'll admit I have much better luck when searching for hiragana than I do with romaji, but this can be pretty helpful. I often begin with romaji, find the hiragana, and then re-run my orginal query in hiragana (to make sure both answers match). "Level of formality" is non-existent here, so caveat emptor.
• Japanese Verb Conjugator: An awesome reference for verb conjugations, and from what I can tell, is fairly exhaustive when they have a verb in their system.
• Puni Puni Japan: I like this site for it's simple and straightforward presentation of counters. I haven't explored a lot of it but from what I can tell the lessons are pretty great.

• Reading and Writing Japanese Hiragana: A Character Workbook for Beginners. This book is wonderful, and we used it in conjunction with a handful of worksheets below (in the next section). It's worth it to go through the entire book - there are some great exercises for both reading and writing.
• Reading and Writing Japanese Katakana: A Character Workbook for Beginners. Also wonderful, same notes apply to this book as well.
• All About Particles, by Naoko Chino. This book is wickedly helpful, as it begins with the two most elemental particles ("wa" and "ga"), and the sample sentences are clear and concise, and you can build your vocabulary up as you go.
• A Dictionary of Japanese Particles. This is such a great book. It lists ~150 Japanese particles and has usage examples for each, grouped by specific use (most Japanese particles have multiple uses). Go one particle at a time (start with something simple like "ya", "yo", or "ne").
• The Handbook of Japanese Verbs. Such a wonderful book. It demystifies Japanese verbs by walking through the simple and elegant way that Japanese verbs are conjugated. Your understanding of how verbs are transformed will have a huge impact on your Japanese.
• Handbook of Modern Japanese Grammar. This is a great book that you should set aside for the first few months of your journey. Begin to consult it when you're running into multiple predicates, or and other similar non-trivial sentence structure.
• A Guide to Reading and Writing Japanese. For Kanji, we're using this book. I've had a hard time finding a goo Kanji book (some lack stroke order, some seem fairly random in their presentation. We needed a single book that had an interesting number of Kanji in it that we could study in order.

Note: All of the following are single-sheet PDFs, except the 1st one, which is 10 pages.

• Hiragana Practice Sheets: You can start on hiragana right now with this PDF. It will walk you though most of the characters and has the stroke order included.
• One Column Exercises: Once you learn some of the initial characters (a..o [あ..お], ka..ko [か..こ], sa..so [さ..そ]), you can use this sheet to randomize them and practice multiple characters at the same time.
• Two Column Exercises: As you learn more characters (a..o [あ..お], ka..ko [か..こ], sa..so [さ..そ], ta..to [た..と]), move on to this sheet and work right to left (once I did one pass on this, I'd cover my previous work with a blank sheet of paper and do my 2nd pass, thus the "work right to left").
• Four Column Exercises: This one is all characters except ma..mo [ま..も], wo [を], n [ん], ya [や], yu [ゆ], and yo [よ].
• Four Column Exercises: All characters included.

• Wordlist 1: We made some fun hiragana/katakana wordlists from the books in the previous section. The left-hand side is hiragana, the right-hand side is katakana.
• Wordlist 2 These are just for practicing your hiragana and katakana by mixing up the character combinations.
• Wordlist 3 The page numbers of the respective books are written in the margins for reference.
• Wordlist 4 I'll endeavor to make more of these. They're fun to fill out. A relaxing meditation on kana, I think.

• Exceptions List: We took the exceptions from both hiragana and katakana and turned them into a worksheet. Page numbers are referenced.
• Katakana Practice Sounds: Katakana has some "contracted sounds", as well as some "innovative sounds". We put these into a worksheet. The "gekko is for fun (go ahead, draw a ゲッコ on the worksheet / we do!).

• Here's a blank Kana worksheet, if you'd like to make your own.
• Here's a blank wordlist worksheet, if you'd like to make your own.
• Here's a blank expressions worksheet, if you'd like to make your own. You'll see examples of this worksheet in the next section.

Once you're all done with these worksheets, I'd proceed to the "Part 2" sections of the hiragana and katakana workbooks:

1. Reading and Writing Japanese Hiragana: Page 44
2. Reading and Writing Japanese Katakana: Page 42

Note: All of the following are PDFs.

• Days and Colors: A list of some very common and useful words. (COMPLETED)
• Days of the Month (and some time-related terms). (COMPLETED)
• Some common adjectives (big, small, far, near, etc) (COMPLETED)
• Some useful expressions (hajimemashte, etc) (COMPLETED)
• Some useful expressions for greeting ("when will you be ready", etc) (COMPLETED)
• Some more useful/common words (father, mother, head, face, etc) (COMPLETED)
• All time, date, weeks, months, years, etc (last year, this year, next year, etc) (COMPLETED)
• Wordlist 25/26 (misc nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc) (COMPLETED)
• Wordlist 27/28 (same) (COMPLETED)
• Wordlist 34/35 (same) (COMPLETED)
• Wordlist 37/38 (same) (COMPLETED)
• Wordlist 39/40 (same) (COMPLETED)
• Wordlist 41/42 (same) (COMPLETED)
• Wordlist 43/44 (same) (COMPLETED)

Alina and I made some snappy verb conjugation flash cards. We've printed a couple of sets of these and will endeavor to make them available via the website soon.

Japanese verbs have many, many conjugations, and so we decided to focus on the most essential nine of them as we began to learn the language. We've picked up a number of new conjugations along the way, and they're making it into our "Sentence Practice" sheets below.

Perhaps one of the best things we made are these sentence worksheets, putting together some decently interesting sentences to flex subject-verb order, verb tense, multiple predicates, and of course the vocabulary we've been working on.

We'll endeavor to post the "answers" as we create them. A handful of the worksheets already have their associated hiragana, also posted below.

These are limited to hiragana and katakana... we've included some katakana for words like Seattle (シアトル), Bubble Tea (タピオカティー), and America (アメリカ).

Note that the romaji is only there in case you need to reference it because you simply can't remember something. We usually cover that section of the page with a blank envelope while writing out the hiragana.

Note: All of the following are PDFs.

We started studying some of the common particles and made some exercises to start test-driving these. On the short list is "ne" and "yo", but these are all I have for now.

Note: All of the following are PDFs.

We've learned enough counters that we need some worksheets. Each of these sheets has ~six counters on it, with slots for 1..10, and at the bottom of each column is the 1,2,3 for the counter (if you need a memory jog).

• Counters 00 has numbers, generic counters, animals (tanuki, ushi, lisu, and amai inu!) age, minutes, days.
• Counters 01 has weeks, nights, small thin things (pens), thin things (sheets of paper), books/volumes, small objects.
• Counters 02 has seconds, hours, months, years.

We finally started making some decent kanji worksheets based on A Guide to Reading and Writing Japanese from the booklist above.

The goal here is to be able to re-visit sets of kanji multiple times (the book itself doesn't contain worksheets, but it does have an awesome set of very useful kanji, along with stoke count and order, as well as definitions and references, so it's a wonderful list.

Here's the current set of Kanji worksheets:

Coming soon!