EDUCATIONAL RENAISSANCE / Teachers of Japanese getting lit.

EDUCATIONAL RENAISSANCE / Teachers of Japanese getting little govt help

Rie Kyogoku / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

Yomiuri

The following is excerpted from The Yomiuri Shimbun's Educational Renaissance series. This is the last installment of a three-part series focusing on Japanese-language education for foreigners living in Japan.

Veteran teacher Noriko Koyama cautions her students, who are studying to teach foreign learners of Japanese: "When saying 'sekiyu-gaisha' , we native speakers of Japanese often do not pronounce the first three syllables exactly as written in hiragana. Many of us pronounce [the first part] 'sekyu.' We realize how we pronounce it only after finding that our students write it down as 'sekyu' when they …