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Okay, now I think the Japanese Student Guild is a great guild (why wouldn''t it be, I created it) and we''re well established (on Gaia for nearly 9 months!) and have over 500 members. The thing I''m concerned about is not being focused much on the language itself. Now that we have many members, with quite a few having a lot of Japanese language experiance, I think we should try to organize a cohesive Japanese lesson thread. This isn''t it, I''m just making a sticky to see who interested and what suggestions are for how it should work before we officially start (should we ever start)

Here''s what I''m thinking: We''ll have a lesson a day (maybe only 5 days a week to give people a break). These won''t be terribly long lessons, just as much as you think the average Japanese student could absorb in a day, like a presenting a new grammar form, a couple example sentance or a dialogue, and perhaps some supplimental vocabulary. Each lesson will build on previous lessons, and perhaps there can be review, tests, supplimental culture notes, etc.

If you are interested in being a Lesson Writer, here some possible base criteria
arrow A good working knowledge of beginners Japanese. I know that term "beginners" is vague, but I think idealy someone with good "Beginners" knowledge will have formally studied Japanese in a structured class for at least a year. I think any interested writers will have to determine what their own level is since it varies so much from school to school. a classmate of mine got through 4 years of Highschool japanese without really learning the plain form. Not sure how that happened but it did.
arrow Be willing to commit themselves to writting a lesson a week. And don''t just lift lessons from other places on the web or from books.
arrow Have a computer that you''re able to write in Japanese in, so each lesson will essentially be written in Kana/Kanji (perhaps hold off on difficult Kanji) and in romaji. If you really want to write lessons but the computer you use doesn''t type in Japanese, I might go in and add it for you if you ask nice.
arrow make the effort to read previous lessons and build off of those lessons.
arrow accept critizism/corrections graciously, and being mature overall.

My Suggestions for posting rule:
arrow Should we have 5-7 people willing to write lessons, I think it would be best to assign a day to them, and make sure that they have their lesson posted by a certain time on their day. Since we''re all in a bunch of different timezones, just for consistancy, I''m suggesting the deadline for posting a lesson would be 11:59pm Pacific time on their day. If the writer doesn''t have it posted by then (and, you know, give or take an hour on that time), they''ve miss their chance and will have to just post the next week.
arrow Post should be written in proper Japanese, though I think making side notes about colloquial japanese would be good.
arrow Each post should have grammer in it, no "vocabluary only" posts. It''s necessary to know all this vocab, but it doesn''t do people a lot of good to post long-a** vocab lists while not explaining how to use them. (Can you learn a language from a dictionary? no)

I think this post is long enough, so post your suggestions, and post if you''re interested. This might be too much to ask, I dunno.

After that we would move on to simple words and sentence structures A wa B des and then later we would move to more complex words and the TTPOV sentence structure (topic time place object verb) rolleyes that does sound like a lot now but i will help make it easy, hey i had to learn this stuff too... rofl anyways what do you guys think, freakazette you?

I think I can help out. I only have enough japanese knowledge to write lessons at the very start (like the kana pronounciation) however. . .

I volunteer to make images for the hiragana/kanji in each lesson for the people who can't see japanese fonts, and host them in a photobucket account or something after each lesson is posted.

Example/Demonstration



I can also make simple animated gifs where appropriate (for example a sentence with slowly flashing particles)

EDIT: Ack, accidentally double posted. Sorry bout that.

Hmm, how exactly do you petition? I do think it would be a very useful feature considering how cluttered some guild forums can get.

i thought about starting a game to help people learn (other than shiritori). any objections? i got a couple ideas kicking around...

japanese bingo is awesome you put the japanese vocab on the scuares and then you call out the english rolleyes i dont know how u would do that on the internet question