I don’t know if you managed to catch Genki English on the TBS Radio Show “Stream” the other day. I didn’t because I’m in Italy but apparently they were doing a special on phonics are were very (pleasantly) surprised to find out the how easy it is and that the alphabet song doesn’t have to be “ay bee see” (they were using the Genki Phonics song instead). Eventhough educators use the word phonics all the time, it still is a pretty new thing for most people, and is magical when they do see how simple it is.

Over on the forum there was a question the other day that said “Is it ever OK to use katakana in English class”. ( Katakana is the Japanese script that some teachers use to write out English words). My answer was “It would be if there were new symbols that represent just ‘k’ instead of ‘ka’ etc. but hang on, we already have them …. phonics, which is just katakana for English!”.

Maybe that’s an easier way to explain it to parents and teachers in Japan?