The Utilization of OJAD Website to Improve Japanese Speaking Skills in Vocational High School

Abstract

Japanese differs from Indonesian in letters, grammatical patterns, pronunciation, and vocabulary. These differences make students burdensome to understand Japanese because some vocabularies are similar in pronunciation, for example, the word ichi which means one, with the word shichi which means seven. Moreover, most of them often read words that should be read long to be short, for example, the word ohayou (good morning) is read as ohayo. In addition, theyalso find it difficult to pause when pronouncing sentences in Japanese. As a result, it affects students with unnatural accents. This certainly hinders students' Japanese speaking skills. Coming to overcome the problems above, the researcher uses the OJAD (Online Japanese Accent Dictionary) website for learning Japanese. OJAD is a website in which there are various features and one of the features is the Suzuki-kun Prosody Tutorial. Through this feature, students practice pronouncing words or sentences in Japanese according to pronunciation accuracy, including accents and intonations. This research employs descriptive qualitative study. The purpose of this research is to explain the use of OJAD in improving Japanese speaking skills and to describe students' impressions of using the OJAD website to improve the Japanese speaking skills of grade X students of a Vocational High School in Cilacap. The result shows that with the OJAD website, students’ Japanese speaking skills increase, which means students can pronounce Japanese sentences with better pronunciation and intonation than before. Furthermore, there is an improvement in the Japanese speaking skills of grade X students of a Vocational High School in Cilacap. In addition, learning Japanese by using the OJAD website as a media lesson makes students more enthusiastic and feel fun when learning Japanese. The results of this study are expected to be a reference for improving proficiency in Japanese, especially in terms of Japanese speaking skills.