Transition Times: Keen to learn about a new culture? Then Japanese could be for you.

Leaving Certificate Japanese was examined for the first time this year, when 39 students sat the paper. More than 100 students enrolled for the subject this September, and additional schools are offering the language as a core option. It's still a minority subject, but its quiet popularity has been fed by a number of features that distinguish Japanese from other languages on the Leaving Cert syllabus.

Students who did not enjoy their Junior Certificate language choice but would like to have another modern language for the Leaving can take Japanese for the first time in fifth year. Japanese and Russian are the only languages that students can take from scratch in fifth year.

Japanese is in many respects easier to master than the Romance languages. It has no future tense, subjects or declinations, and the grammar is so consistent that once you learn the rules you can trust they will always apply. On the tricky side, Japanese has three alphabets.

To help Irish students to learn the first Asian language ever to appear on the Irish school syllabus, the Post-Primary Languages Initiative has devised an original method of teaching Japanese.

Instead of starting with the hiragana alphabet, which is primarily concerned with grammar, or the kanji alphabet, which has thousands of characters, Irish students are introduced to the 48-character katakana alphabet.

The katakana consists of symbols that represent words foreign to the Japanese language, such as "Ireland" and "restaurant". These words make up 15 per cent of spoken Japanese, 30 per cent of written Japanese and 80 per cent of Japanese advertising.

The katakana is relatively simple to learn, and a student could fare quite well in Tokyo armed only with these 48 characters.

There is also a large cultural component to the programme that is new to most Irish students.

"I wanted to get across to Irish students that Japanese culture is not all kimonos and geisha girls," says Ursula Zimmerman of Institiúid Teangeolaíochta Éireann, the Linguistics Institute of Ireland.

"I devised these class resources with modern Japan in mind - manga comics, baseball and J-pop."

Some more traditional aspects of Japanese culture, such as calligraphy, Japanese cuisine and martial arts, also feature.

Zimmerman believes that the inclusion of Japanese on the post-primary curriculum offers students a chance to start again with language.

"Students that have not had a great experience with European languages often shine at Japanese," she says. "It's a level playing field, a whole new set of rules. The experience of the new culture is exciting, and in a relatively short period of time a student can get the hang of basic Japanese."

For an archive of the Decision time series, visit the transition-year section of www.skoool.ie