Where to find students to teach

hello, I would like to teach English and Japanese privately but am not sure of the best way to find students. can someone recommend a way by which I could do so?I already have soem ideas but any new ones would be much appreciated

Myles

Hi,

Did you think about posting on the German "Japanologie" boards? Lots of people there who want to improve their Japanese.

Here is a good start; that's how I booked a lesson with a private Japanese tutor. Post to the Classified Ads section, saying what levels you offer, the going rate, your experience etc.

how long would it take for a person that has no clue in Japanese to be able to read (and understand) lets say a basic book or a comic magazine? i am not interested in speaking.

Based on my experience with Chinese (which is basically the same script, though the Japanese have added some stuff on top of it), I'd say that unless you are willing to spend 5+ years of at least 10 hours of study every week, you have no chance of ever being able to read and understand a comic book (I've been studying Chinese for a long time, and I'm nowhere close to being able to read a comic book). Anyone who's done it faster, please correct me...

Japanese has 3 alphabets; hiragana, katakana and kanji. As Tom a says, it depends how much time you're willing to spend learning Japanese. There are also special books on how to read manga, but they're only helpful once you've mastered at least hiragana and katakana, and some kanji. There is a magazine called Hiragana Times which is only in hiragana (I guess), so it should be fine to read quite quickly, the only problem being your lack of vocab.

I thought Japanese still centers mainly on Kanji, i.e. without Kanji, you can forget about understanding any sort of text.
Is that not true in your experience, UA?

I'm only a beginner, but from what I've gathered it depends on the text. Of course my teacher is removing kanji and replacing it with hiragana at the moment.

æˆ?功ã?®å¤šã??を望む! Or something like that...

Now, I understand that! Without knowing Japanese, but Chinese Basically, Japanese came from China donkey dynasty ago. I heard they were sent by Emperor Huang to find the solution to longevity (ginseng)... I guess that's why some of the Japanese words sound like Chinese dialect since they do not pronounce our kanji the same way.

Kanji is the killer. Hiragana and Katakana are easy to learn and then you are on an equal footing with other languages (except that Japanese is so easy to pronounce). However, Kanji is thrown into the equation and that is in a different league.

Japanese really only has one alphabet(in terms of sounds), with two phoenetic written alphabets to write those sounds. hiragana is used to write Japanese words and katakana is used to write borrowed words from other langauges(mainly from English, of which there are far too many.)
Kanji was taken from China a few thousand years ago and is used in place of or either in combination with hiragana to basically make the sentence more readable as Kanji are essentially pictograms, in the same way that hyroglyphics(not sure of the spelling) are. If learn many kanji and then go back to trying to read sentences written only in hiragana it is actually really difficult! The Chinese infact were the ones who simplified their characters, the Japanese didnt. so the Japanese characters are infact old chinese. contrary to common beleif Japanese is Grammatically in no way related to Chinese. in fact chinese is alot more similar to English than Japanese(grammatically, in terms of word order).
I think its alot harder to learn Chinese as they use alot more characters, due to the fact they have no phoenetic alphabet like Japanese. furthermore, as I understand it Chinese pronounciation is particularly difficult, while Japanese pronounciation is relatively easy.

1.The Altaic Family is named after the Alti Mountains, in Central Asia. These people were nomadic horsemen living in the plains. One group migrated towards Europe, the other group migrated towards the Korean Peninsula and the islands of Japan.

Turkish is the most westerly member of this family as well as the most spoken. Many of the others are spoken in former USSR republics (Azeri in Azerbaijan), Turkmen (in Turkmenia), Kazakh (in Kazakhstan), Kirghiz (in Kyrghystan), Uzbec (in Uzbekistan, land of Genghis Khan), Uigur (in Western China east of the Pamir Mountains).

Mongolian is found in Mongolia (where it is written in the Cyrillic script) and Northern China (with a script that goes down rather than horizontal). Korean and Japanese are the most easterly Altaic languages.

2. The Sino-Tibetan Family is an important Asian family of languages. It contains the world's most spoken language, Mandarin, the official language of China.

The languages in this family are monosyllabic tonal languages. Words are made up of single syllables: Mandarin has over 1600. GUO - country, MEN - gate, WO - I, REN - person, AN - peace. The syllables themselves have tones. This means that the voice can be high, low, rising, falling, etc, just like singing. It is like the way many Europeans raise their voice at the end of a question. As an example the syllable, MEN can mean gate or we depending on tone. Mandarin has four tones, Thai has five (MAI can mean not, burn, wood or no depending on tone), Cantonese has nine and Kam-Sui has 15.

The languages in the Sinitic Branch are the various languages of China (Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Amoy, Gan, Min, Hakka, Xiang, Yue). They are all written in Chinese characters. Each syllable has a different character so that the writing is not alphabetic. There are over 50,000 characters, 6000 of which are needed to read a newspaper. Even though the different languages have different pronunciations, the meanings of characters are the same.

The languages in the Tibeto-Burman Branch are spoken in Burma (Burmese, Karen) Thailand and Laos (Lisu, Lahu), Southern China (Chin, Yi), Tibet (Tibetan), Bhutan (Jonkha), Nepal (Sherpa, Newari), and eastern India (Mizo, Manipuri, Bodo).

each kanji can also have several different pronunication: On (Old Chinese) and Kun (Japanese) yomi (reading/pronunciation)

Ancient Turkish, looks kind of funky.

very interesting information about the Altaic langauge family. thankyou!

Myles