Japanese Classes at our Language Door School in San Diego. Serving students in San Diego, El Cajon, Santee, Chula Vista, La Mesa, La Jolla California.

Learn a language today, open the door to tomorrow!

Language Door San Diego offers small interactive Japanese classes! Our comfortable, casual environment helps to make learning Japanese fun and convenient. We schedule our classes at times that work for busy adults. Enrich your life as you learn one language or learn many.

Konnichi wa!

Japanese is a language whose popularity has grown over the years. With the spread of Japanese culture through anime (cartoons), video games and manga (comic books), Japanese is particulalrly well-loved by younger people.

Of course, it is also a language of business as Japan is the second largest economy in the world.

Here are some interesting facts about Japanese:

Japanese, spoken by more than 125 million people in Japan, ranks among the top ten languages of the world. No definite link has been established between Japanese and any other language, living or dead. Though it adopted the Chinese picto-graphic characters in the 3rd century BCE, Japanese is not, genetically related to Chinese. Japanese does resemble Korean in grammatical structure, and though some scholars have suggested that they are related, this remains to be proven.

The Japanese ideographs, known as kanji, number in the thousands. The kanji designate the chief meaningful words of the language-nouns, verbs, and adjectives. They are, supplemented by the kana, or syllabic characters, which are used chiefly to designate suffixes, particles, conjunctions, and other grammatical forms. Each kana character stands for a single syllable rather than for a whole word. Theoretically any Japanese word can be written exclusively in the kana but the large number of homonyms in the language makes this impractical. Modern Japanese, is written with a mixture of kanji and kana characters. Japanese is generally written vertically beginning on the right, but many texts today are written horizontally to permit the inclusion of English words, Arabic numerals, and mathematical and chemical formulas. Though various movements over the years have advocated the adoption of the Roman script, native tradition and the great Japanese literary heritage militate against such a change.

Feel a desire to learn Japanese now? Language Door San Diego can help with that!

Please check the schedule.

• San Diego Weekly Language Class Schedule
• San Diego Language Immersion Class Schedule
• San Diego Language Crash Course Schedule
• San Diego Kids Language Program Schedule

For the beginning and intermediate classes, we use "Ultimate Japanese Basic-Intermediate" by Living Language.  There is also an optional eight cassette or CD package that accompanies the book. For the advanced classes, we provide handouts at no charge.

Beginning A (chapters 1-5)

Topics – Introductions, Nationalities, Shopping, Wrestling, and Movies
Grammar and usage – pronunciation, the copula with nouns, negation of copula with nouns, verbs, questions, personal pronouns, particles, verbs in past affirmative, numbers, i-adjectives, na-adjectives, question words, adjective modifying the noun, adjective present negative, ko-so-a-do words, etc.

Beginning B (chapters 6-10)

Topics – Weather, Seasons, Clothing, Colors, At the Airport, Renting an Apartment, and Family
Grammar and usage – the past negative of the copular with nouns, time expressions, past tense of adjectives, particles, -tai “to want to,” hoshii “to want,” location nouns, numbers, counters, kinship terms, etc.

Beginning C (chapters 11-15)

Topics – Presents, A Sight-seeing Trip, Sports, At the Beauty Parlor, and Job Hunting
Grammar and usage – to give/receive, normal and plain forms of verbs, verb classification; consonant verbs, vowel verbs, explanatory predicates, to be able to, more particles, TE-form of verbs, requests and invitations, additional counters, “TE iru,” “shiru” – to know, the pain form of i-adjectives, the plain copula, “soo desu (hearsay)”, etc.

Beginning D (chapters 16-20)

Topics –Transportation, Asking for directions, Paying a visit to a home, Medical care, and Telephone conversations
Grammar and usage – negative forms summary, experience, more counters, “-tara (if/when),” more uses of TE-form, TE-form of adjectives and with noun, “hazu (expectation),” relative clause, “-soo (it seems),” potential form of verbs, etc.

Intermediate A (chapters 21-25)

Topics – New Year, The post office, Wedding, Restaurants and Hot springs
Grammar and usage – “naru (to become),” “deshoo,” multiple particles, “even if,” “need not,” negative requests, BA-form, “Rashii (assumptiom),” additional question words, superlatives, comparatives, negative comparison, etc.

Intermediate B (chapters 26-30)

Topics – New Year, The post office, Wedding, Restaurants and Hot springs
Grammar and usage – “naru (to become),” “deshoo,” multiple particles, “even if,” “need not,” negative requests, BA-form, “Rashii (assumptiom),” additional question words, superlatives, comparatives, negative comparison, etc.

Intermediate C (chapters 31-35)

Topics – A job interview, company employees, the tea ceremony, indoor entertainment, and politics
Grammar and usage – regular honorific verbs, “-sugiru (too much),” “TE aru,” obligation, “TE hoshii (to want somebody to…,” causative sentences, causative passive sentences, “TE kuru,” male and female speech, TE oku, “made ni” and “made” with a verb, etc.

Intermediate D (chapters 36-40)

Topics – Education, Traditional theater, Fine arts, Bookstores and Poetry
Grammar and usage – TE shimau, while – “aida” and “nagara,” command/invitation, “may/might,” question words in embedded sentences, “tame ni (purpose),” plain commands, enumeration, classical and modern Japanese, sound changes in compound words, etc.

Text Book used in Orange County, San Diego and Los Angeles.

Advanced Classes

If you would like to discuss material covered in these levels, contact us at our Language Door School in San Diego. Ask about our military discount!

Feedback from Our Students

"I like this course, we have fun. It's not boring like when I learned Spanish. I like that we have lecture notes to take home. That is such a good/helpful/useful thing!" Keri.

"I have taken multiple languages at various universities and none have matched the pace that Language Door San Diego has set for its students. I've learned things in the basic (Japanese) class here that I never learned in 4 years of learning Japanese (at other schools). – Alex, San Diego School

"Kazue is a good teacher. Approachable and helpful in and out of class. The course moves quickly, but she does a good job moving us along and keeping us up to speed," Lynn, San Fernando Valley School.

"The teacher is very nice and helpful. Answers questions with a good explanation," Emily, Los Angeles School.

"The class is taught by a great teacher who is enthusiastic and fun," Abu, San Diego School.

"The Course is good. Because of its small class size, we can cover a lot of material quickly," Lynn, San Fernando Valley School.

"Very good - interesting to practice vocabulary and hiragana..." Frederic, LA school.

"Good, fun, engaging," Kurt, Orange County School.

"She [the teacher] is very helpful and explains everything well, and answers all of our questions. She is also very nice," Keri, Orange County School.

Language Description

There are approximately 125 million Japanese speakers, and most of them reside in Japan.  A good number of Japanese speakers can also be found in Ryukyu Island (Okinawa), Korea, Taiwan, Parts of the United States, and Brazil.   Although some linguists suggest that Japanese has some connection with Korean, Chinese and Altaic languages, the origin of this language still remains uncertain.

Further Information

For further information about San Diego Japanese classes, Los Angeles Japanese classes, San Fernando Valley Japanese classes or Orange County Japanese classes, please follow the links on the navigation bar on the right. Thank you!