Japanese

Description

JAPANESE

BLS Adult Winter Term Language Courses 2025: Accelerate your language learning

Beginner Level 1 Course (CEFR A1.1): [Tutor Shiho] online course
Wednesday, 6.20-7.50pm, 10 x 90 min. lessons [on 15, 22, 29 January & 05, 12, 19, 26 February & 05, 12, 19 March 2025] £155 Course Programme

Japanese

Learning Japanese has never been more interesting and amusing than it is today.

Japanese constitutes the unique language family ‘Japonic’, and it is the ninth most spoken of all the existing languages, with over 121 million of its speakers centred in Japan as of 2009. By this year, too, the number of Japanese learners outside the country had reached above 3.5 million–a figure indicating a sharp 75 per cent increase from around 2 million in 1998 and anticipating a continuous trend for many years to come.

Japanese pop culture now receives international acclaim. Japanese manga, anime, music, cinema, cuisine, and fashion, among others, are greatly enjoyed around the world, and ‘Cool Japan’ is widely circulated to describe the country’s reinventing global cultural influence (the term is officially adopted by the Government as a promotional slogan for Japanese cultural industry). A knowledge of Japanese will allow a fuller enjoyment of the various attractions that ‘Cool Japan’ offers. Needless to say, a good command of Japanese is essential to enter the Japanese job market as well as desirable for tourists to enrich their experience in Japan.
written by Lawrence Masakazu Yoneta