Musa Murchison

Créer la carrière de vos rêves : découvrir et utiliser vos atouts créatifs

<p>Love your excitement. I love working with kids as well. I spent time in Okinawa when I was in the Marine Corps...a long time ago! I love it there.</p>

<p>I had no idea that foreign expat children weren't required to go to school in Japan! (I live in Tokyo.) Sounds like a major need and you have the exact talent to fill the gap. If you're in Tokyo as well, happy to grab coffee and be a "pseudo" student to practice on. Good luck!</p>

Thanks for the support! I really hope so! Unfortunately I'm in not in Tokyo, but please live the best life in one of the most exciting cities! Stay safe!

<p>This sounds wonderful, and it speaks to me because I was an expat kid (though not in Japan). As much as my parents wanted my siblings and I to go through the local school systems, language was the major thing that kept us out.</p><p>I don't know how long ago you posted this, so I'm curious what your next steps are and/or how this project has come along since. Either way, I wish you the best, and I hope you don't get too bogged down by administrative stuff to be kept from actual teaching.</p>

Thank you so much for your support! <div><br /></div><div>I started this course less than a month ago, so there are unfortunately not many updates. Still, it makes me really happy that my dream has been heard and encouraged! </div><div><br /></div><div> Since I posted this, I have been working on Phase 1: Researching Japanese Applied Linguistics. Even though I can't finance graduate school right now, I have been reading many research papers from Amy Snyder-Ohta, an Applied Japanese Linguistics expert from the University of Washington. 

Thank you so much for your encouragement again! </div><div><br /></div><div>If there is anything you could think of that you would have loved to have in an program/app like this, please let me know!</div>

Nice to hear back from you! Research papers sound like a good place to start; I imagine the deeper your understanding of how Japanese works, the better you can design a program for teaching it.<div><br /></div><div>To answer "what I'd have loved to have"...

First, some context: I studied Arabic for ~6 years at school (while living in Arab countries) but I'm still pretty incompetent with it. By contrast, I can actually get by in real-world situations with my ~3 years of self-taught Mandarin. Two things made a massive difference to my Mandarin experience, which I really, really wish I'd had in my Arabic classes.</div><div><br /></div><div>First, though I was a "good student" who did my homework, I didn't how to effectively *practice* the 4 skills of a language. And I didn't realize this until the 'Learning How To Learn' course on Coursera, which taught me meta-learning skills like how to memorize through spaced repetition. That course also introduced me to "language hackers" (people who make a hobby of learning foreign languages), whose techniques are VERY different from anything I ever saw in a classroom. I really wish my teachers had taught us these meta-skills.</div><div><br /></div><div>The other thing is, because my Mandarin study is self-directed, I get to focus on what's actually relevant to my life. I can (for instance) create vocabulary sets based on the real situations I find myself in. Whereas a major frustration with school language classes was that, while I could pass exams, <span style="font-family:'GT Walsheim Pro', Arial, sans-serif;font-size:16px;font-style:normal;font-weight:400;">outside of school</span><span style="font-family:'GT Walsheim Pro', Arial, sans-serif;font-size:16px;font-style:normal;font-weight:400;"> </span>I could barely understand what people were saying all around me - much less express myself. The few teachers I look back on fondly are the ones who made sure we had regular non-textbook, non-exam-related assignments where we could pick our topics. So, as much as possible, try to have students bring their actual interests and lived experiences into lessons.</div><div><br /></div><div>I hope this is helpful, and good luck!</div>

Hey Mei,
you seem really passionate about what you're doing. Keep up the good work!

<p><iframe height="480" width="854" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-forms allow-same-origin allow-popups"></iframe>In Japan, foreign expat children aren't required to attend school because there aren't enough qualified teachers or programs to teach them. This includes the Japanese language. I want to help children learn Japanese as a second language so they have the power to take control of their education while in Japan as well as their communicative freedom.&nbsp;</p>


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