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lajzar · Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Posts: 647 Location: Saitama-ken, Japan

www.lajzar.co.uk/en/index.html

I'm making a series of online games for learning English. It is primarily aimed at upper shougakusei/chuugakusei. So far, there are a bunch of vocabulary builders there. I have a few kaiwa narabi ones ready to upload too.

Comments please? Am I going in entirely teh wrong direction? Any suggestions for improvement?

Celeste · Posted: Fri Oct 24, 2003 11:45 pm Post subject:

For the elementary school stuff, you would do better to have some sound files rather than the written words because many elementary schools take the mombusho directive of "do not focus on reading and writing English" to mean that "children are prohibited from learning to read the English alphabet". Many of the schools where I teach, the kids learn Romaji from grade 6 and then they only learn it for romanizing Japanese, not for writing English words. I recently received a drawing of a cat from one of my 6th grade girls and under it she had printed KYATTO be cause this was as close as she could come to the word in the Japanese roamaji system.

lajzar · Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Posts: 647 Location: Saitama-ken, Japan

I know

Its a download speed issue.

Plain text page - 4 kb
The colours page - 10 kb (very simple images, so good compression)

12 x 2 second sound files would hit 250 kb for low quality audio easily. Oh, and I don't have a mike yet either Embarassed

I just uploaded a couple of conversations (kaiwa-narabi). Again, text only. I think the text is sufficiently random that creating sufficient sound files to accomodate would create serious download time problems.

One possible solution for the vocabulary builders is to use pictures instead of text, such as with the colours. My main problem here is lack of suityable pictures, although I certainly plan to do this as soon as I can.

J-Pop · Joined: 07 Oct 2003 Posts: 215 Location: USA

lajzar,

I would be happy to take a look at your site. However, no can do! Sad

I tried, 2 (or 3) times. I'm able to access all other sites w/o any probs. Did I read, somewhere, in one of your other posts (in the General forum, maybe)? that some people cannot access the site?

If that is true, then won't this be a problem for some of your intended audience? Or, are the browsers used in Japan (assuming it is a browser issue) different than in other parts of the world?

If you can think of a way to get around this issue, let me know & I will gladly check it out. I love kids. And I especially love working with little Japanese people (kinders to about the sixth grade)!

BTW, I think the comments of Celeste were excellent. Those are exactly the kinds of issues you need to be aware of & the kind of feedback you want, right?

Though I worked with many groups of Japanese children, these were relatively brief periods of times & different groups (typically for a couple hours, or half-a-day, maybe one full day--at a time). So, I was not aware of what Celeste mentioned. Good stuff.