 Watashi no namae wa yuruginde, watashi wa nihongo hanashimasu. This is supposed to be Japanese, but to be honest, I don't speak Japanese at all, but I know a lot about it. For example, I know that Japanese has post-positions, that the word order of Japanese is, well before I tell you, I invite you to find out yourselves and welcome you to a truly exploratory online course, the Linguistic Fieldwork Course, the VLC 402 Linguistic Fieldwork Japanese. Like all fieldwork courses on the Virtual Linguistics Campus, VLC 402 simulates this situation. You're stranded within a linguistically previously unexplored territory and want to explore the language to which you are exposed. In other words, a classical fieldwork situation in accordance with Joseph Greenberg and Edward Sapir. By means of interaction with a native speaker who neither speaks nor understands your language, we want to find out as many details about his or her language as possible. In a real fieldwork situation, you collect your data in various live meetings with a native speaker. On the Virtual Linguistics Campus, we do it online. By means of a virtual speaker in various virtual settings where you can retrieve and explore the data via mouse click. This is how the content of VLC 402, Japanese, like in all other fieldwork courses on the VLC, is organized. The course starts with a general description and the usual preliminaries that provide a general overview of the course, including the prerequisites. The first content unit is of utmost importance for all fieldwork activities. It discusses some general aspects of the language in focus and introduces the underlying methodology from phonetics to syntax to make you fit for the exploratory part of the course. The core of the course are the fieldwork units, each with an exploratory part, the so-called virtual scene, which is dedicated to a particular topic. The first scene deals with simple objects. In our virtual interview room, you find the native speaker and a number of clickable objects with their audio and orthographic representation. Your task is to transcribe what you hear as carefully as possible in order to set up the first sound inventory of the language in focus. Other scenes deal with number, with adjectives, for example the colors, with locative relationships and the organization of ad-positional phrases, and even with sentences that are acted out by a second person in the virtual room. Starting with a second explorative unit, each unit starts with a hypothesis section where the previous assumptions and speculations are not only summarized, but are also judged by the native speaker. The units or topics are activated in a successive fashion, that is, in contrast to all other virtual linguistics campus courses, you cannot access the units all at once, but only successfully. This guarantees that students first build their hypotheses before they see the solutions. For example, the unit number can only be accessed if two previous activities are completed, and the subsequent unit adjectives is only available if vocabulary test 1 is passed successfully. And the exploration activity of the previous unit was marked as successful. But don't worry, each vocabulary mastery test where you can earn a digital badge is easy to manage. In each unit you find a complete list of vocabulary items that have been collected up to a certain point, enabling you to practice and to prepare yourself for the test. The VLC fieldwork courses are true online courses. They do not involve any face-to-face tuition. Everything should be self-explanatory. However, it is recommended to use the repository forum in the class preliminaries to discuss questions with your fellow participants or even the social media. And on top of that, each fieldwork course has its customized workbook. The workbook can be accessed or downloaded from the preliminary section, and it summarizes the main aspects of each unit in print, but even more importantly, it contains dozens of tables and charts where you can drop your data. Last but not least, the course is certified. Beyond the digital badges that you can obtain via the mastery tests, each fieldwork class is certified with a statement of accomplishment that lists the content and specifies the workload in hours. And as usual, course enrollment is simple. You have to create your free VLC account first and then self-enroll to your fieldwork class by clicking on the course tile. That's it. And in the course, you will be welcomed by the native speaker. The real one, you know? So that's it. Welcome to VLC 402 Linguistic Fieldwork Japan.