Japanese: The Spoken Language (JSL) is an introductory textbook series for learning Japanese. JSL was written by Eleanor Harz Jorden in collaboration with Mari Noda. Part 1 was published in 1987 by Yale Language Press, Part 2 in 1988, and Part 3 in 1990. The series differs from most Japanese language textbooks in many ways, most basically in that it focuses exclusively on the spoken language and leaves discussion of any aspect of the written language to other textbooks, such as the parallel series Japanese: The Written Language.
The textbook is controversial both among students of the language and among pedagogical researchers. Detractors of the textbook take issue with its usage of romaji, the complex grammatical explanations, the emphasis on memorization, and the relatively small number of vocabulary items (among other things). However, these same points are cited as strengths of the textbook by supporters. The approach is based on Jorden's decades of experience in teaching Japanese and pedagogical research, and was preceded by her 1960s textbook, Beginning Japanese, which JSL supersedes.
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Famous quotes containing the words spoken language, spoken and/or language:
“However much we admire the orator’s occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Prose—it might be speculated—is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of “communication”; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider’s delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)