VCE Japanese First Language study guide
VCE Japanese First Language · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
VCE Japanese First Language is a Victorian Certificate of Education study designed for students who already have substantial background in Japanese, typically those who speak or write Japanese at home or have lived and studied in a Japanese-speaking environment. It is one of the VCE First Languages studies accredited by the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, and the current study design has an accreditation period from 2022. The VCE Japanese First Language study guide has 4 sections and about 1,324 words.
01Unit 1: 自己と他者 - Identity, Relationships and the Foundations of Japanese Communication
Unit 1 builds the base for everything that follows: you describe yourself, your family, your school life and your relationships, and you begin to notice how Japanese encodes social distance. The core concepts are self-introduction conventions (姓名の順、呼称、あいさつ), polite register (です・ます体 versus 普通体), kinship and address terms (さん・くん・ちゃん・さま and why you never use さん for yourself), family vocabulary pairs (父/お父さん、兄/お兄さん), and basic sentence patterns that carry information in a fixed order - topic は, time, place で, object を, verb.
351 words, about 2 min02Unit 2: 日常生活と地域社会 - Daily Life, School, Work and Community Interaction
Unit 2 moves from the self to the routines and institutions around it: school timetables, part-time work, shopping, transport, invitations and community events. The concepts you must command are time and sequence marking (〜てから、〜前に、〜たあとで、〜ながら), giving and receiving verbs (あげる・くれる・もらう and their humble/honorific counterparts さしあげる・くださる・いただく), request and permission forms (〜てください、〜てもいいですか、〜てはいけません), invitation and refusal strategies (〜ませんか、〜ましょう、断り方 with ちょっと…), and counter words (〜人、〜枚、〜台、〜回).
331 words, about 2 min03Unit 3: 情報と社会 - Presenting Information, Explaining and Persuading
Unit 3 shifts to extended, structured Japanese: explaining a topic, summarising a text, presenting an opinion and supporting it. The concepts you must understand are paragraph organisation (topic sentence, support, conclusion), connectives that signal logical relations (したがって、その一方で、なぜなら、たとえば、つまり), nominalisation and quotation (〜ということ、〜と考えられる、〜と述べている), passive and causative forms used in reporting, hedging (〜かもしれない、〜と思われる、〜傾向がある), and kanji-go versus wago style - formal writing favours Sino-Japanese vocabulary and である体.
285 words, about 1 min04Unit 4: 言語と文化 - Language, Culture and Critical Reflection
Unit 4 asks you to step back and analyse Japanese as a system and as a cultural practice. You need keigo as a three-part system (尊敬語、謙譲語、丁寧語), honorific and humble verb pairs (いらっしゃる／伺う、おっしゃる／申す、ご覧になる／拝見する), uchi/soto logic and how it governs who is raised and who is lowered, gendered and generation-linked speech , loanwords and script choice (漢語、和語、外来語 and why a word is written in kanji, hiragana or katakana), and language change such as ら抜き言葉 and 若者言葉.
357 words, about 2 min