I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve seen that question on school lesson plans or actually being taught by Japanese teachers! It’s not the most serious mistake in the world, but doesn’t sound very cool, and you wouldn’t get away with teaching 7 + 2 = 8 in maths, so why allow it in English?

The trick I use ( which nearly always works) is to say “I like dogs” means you like dogs ( inu ga suki) but “I like dog” means you like dog flavour ( inu no aji ga suki). This usually sorts the kids out.

For the same reason I’ve also chosen all plurals in the Do you like theme.

To help even more a couple of years ago I came up with the idea of joining the singular answers “I like apple” etc. in with the “What’s your favourite flavour?” question, this really helps in getting the whole thing sorted in the kids’ heads without having to give any consulted grammar explanations. It’s taken me a while to get it into a song form ( it was supposed to go on CD6, but got moved as there were a few problems with the set of flavours I originally chose!), but it’s now available to download, just in time for the Summer season. There’s a also a very nice description of how to introduce the words and some amazing graphics that look like you could eat them off the page, courtesy of my cousin James, and mini cards in Commonwealth and US spellings.

The What’s your favourite flavour? Theme

You could also use this song with the How are you? Monster game, but this time the kids ask “What’s your favourite flavour?” and if you say “Human!” they run back to the safe wall.

If you’d like to add to this post, have a look at the Genki English forum.