Abstract
This paper reports on a class focusing on Japanese linguistic variations. The purpose of this class is to get short-term international students to experience the Japanese language from a perspective apart from the grammatical level, and to incorporate cultural elements to enrich their experience as short-term students. The class focused mainly on dialects, though dealing also with registers and gender-/age-based differences in word usage. The results of the post-course survey show that learners found the class to be useful in daily life and felt their Japanese had broadened. Furthermore, the possibility that an increase in communication skills and intellectual interests facilitates the learning of Japanese through a class like this is considered.
