Japan

This course provides a general introduction to medical anthropology. It first focuses on how humans have biologically adapted to diseases in their environment; then it examines the multiple ways in which medicine, illness, healing, and mental illness are conceived in different societies. The purpose of the course is to demonstrate the diversity of medical practices to understand the socio-cultural aspect of medicine in general. 

This course improves lower advanced level listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. It introduces the 50 most important sentence patterns for advanced level students and reviews the important sentence patterns from the intermediate level. Students acquire a command of practical Japanese necessary for daily communication and for study and research in a Japanese university. They master 8000 basic words and 1500 basic kanji. 

Pragmatics is the study of the meaning of linguistic expressions in context (linguistic and otherwise). Speakers of any language need to grasp different kinds of meaning other than the so-called “literal” one (i.e. propositional meaning) to express what they wish to convey. Pragmatics is also necessary to understand what other people have said or written. Most of the time, people perform this task without much effort, but explicating how it is done is no simple task. This course explores how meaning interacts with structure.
 

The course addresses meanings of the predicate (including thematic roles); functions of nominal expressions (including deixis); politeness, and viewpoint. The special focus is on expressive meanings. Some of these issues are universally found whilst others are salient only in certain languages. 
 
Students who enroll in this course must understand basic concepts in theoretical linguistics. If most students have not taken a pragmatics course, the first few classes will be spent discussing basic concepts in syntax and morphology so that they can later explore multifaceted aspects of "meaning" and apply them for analyses of actual language use.  

An introduction to environmental studies, this course covers what the environment is; what kind of situation we are currently in, and how one's daily life influences the environment in the local and global scale. The course presents the basic system structure of the environment and current efforts of balancing human well-being and environment.