Al wrote:

> takeshi <t-yamaha@love.co.kp> wrote:
> 
>>Talking to one or two students and ignoring the others is not
>>"teaching". A good teacher watches the students to see how they are coping.
> 
> 
> Yes - but not every second. She was very responsive to our comments, and
> she was friendly, but she made a point of challenging us in class, and
> that was the very good thing i posted my comment about. :-)
> 
> The experience of having her throw regular speed Japanese at us has
> helped me to get the idea very quickly that for most normal conversation
> I needed to drop the notion of trying to understand every word and
> instead learn to pay attention to the overall flow and context,
> including body language etc.
> 
> The main obstacle to my own students understanding what is going on
> (whether they encounter spoken or written language) is that they have
> this habit of trying, from the onset, to decipher every word and
> epxression they encounter in linear order rather than sitting back and
> listening to the flow of the language or skimming the tesxt to get the
> basic ideas quickly.
> 
> Al

That's lovely. I have a radio and television that spouts Japanese at one 
hundred miles an hour and is far more interesting.

I remember going to a kanji class with the old Kuroda and coming out 
with about 4 badly written kanji out of about 20 that she "taught" (ie 
had a chat to the 2 Chinese students about them). No idea what the 
readings or meanings were, no hand out, no reference text. Just 50 
minutes of utter confusion.

The intermediate sylabus at Yamasa is a total shambles (or more 
accurately a complete lack of) and needs to be seriously sorted out. 
There's very good reasons few crackers can manage to get passed the the 
first bit of intermediate. But with the lack of interest people like 
Declan take in student complaints that's not going to happen. Spin and 
lies is much easier.