In 2007, The Foreign Student Center of the Tsukuba University, Japan organized a interview among the foreign students' motivation of learning Japanese. Students from different shown particularly quite different answers to the primary motivation. As expected, there are students replied that they love Japanese and Japanese culture (which also divided to traditional culture and popular culture in coarse sense). Students from East Asia, like Chinese or Hong Kong students said they learnt Japanese as they want to have a better resume to pursue a more promising career, which Japanese is solely another weapon they can process. On the other hand, students from Europe or USA mainly replied that they love watching animation, reading comics or even J-pop idols in Japan.

Here is the question. If a non-native speaker would want to understand Japanese usage in the comics, animation, pop songs or TV dramas, there is a long way home. And, everyone knows as if one would like to master a language, they have to learn a lot of hard facts and undergo a great deal of memorizing work. Entertainment is for fun, not for language learning for completely non-native speakers.

More importantly, as researched, we all know students all around the world are getting more and more impatient with a shorter attention span. Especially for university students, quite a number of them urge for quick results in learning, which is normally a mission-impossible in content-based language learning.

Yet, with the recent idea on combining Entertainment and education, Edutainment is a fresh idea on language learning researches. Undoubtedly, Japanese popular culture attracted a lot of people worldwide, which is also major motivation for students learning Japanese. This seminar will try to focus on how to mix the Japanese popular cultural contexts to the Japanese lectures, which can help align the context and the syllabus and to make the lesson entertaining and equally thought-provoking.