Japan

This advanced Japanese course is designed to improve speaking skills. A theme concerning Japanese culture and society is chosen for each course and students are split into groups to engage in activities, discussion, and group work concerning the selected topic. The goal of the class is for students to widen their perspectives and deepen their knowledge regarding various issues related to Japan and Japanese society. The program offers various theme courses and students may take multiple sections. 

This course provides an opportunity to observe and analyze conduct and/or language usage in contemporary Japanese society. The course introduces the basics of qualitative research methods and provides an opportunity to utilize the methods through a group research project investigating socio-cultural aspects of Japan identified in a student's daily life.

The purpose of this course is to provide students with opportunities to gain knowledge about the historical development of schooling and educational problems/difficulties in Japanese society as well as to consider the meanings and roles of education and schooling from different perspectives.  The main focus is on the primary and secondary education in Japan; however, students will also examine other countries’ education systems.  This course consists of a mixture of lectures, discussions, and presentations. Students are also expected to give classmates a broader perspective on education systems/efforts/issues that will be discussed in this course.

This course tackles contemporary ethical issues regarding the development of technology and its impact on the environment by engaging with the latest research being done in this field. In order to achieve these goals, this class will be held in a “flipped classroom” style, wherein students will read through lecture materials in advance to allocate more time for classroom discussions on these pressing issues.

This course covers a roughly 250-year period of Japanese history: the Edo period (1603–1868). It was a time of immense change and vast creativity in visual culture, when the existing forms of representation started to break down, and new forms emerged. The course considers various topics beyond what is commonly considered as art, such as city planning, gardens, religious icons, play space, arts, and artists.

This course summarizes the learning contents for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test N1 level. From the categories of "characters/vocabulary," "grammar," "reading comprehension," and "listening comprehension," exercises will focus on questions that have been newly introduced in the new exam or questions that have been changed in contents and format. The course also provides practice problems aimed at overcoming weaknesses. Also, for students to get used to the question format, a mock test will be conducted just before the proficiency test.

This course is designed for upper beginners to teach basic Japanese grammar and vocabulary. Japanese language is practiced by listening, reading, speaking and writing with new grammar patterns and vocabulary learned in class. The goal of the course is to further develop Japanese literacy and communication skills needed in daily life by expanding basic knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. Texts: MINNANO NIHONGO II; MINNANO NIHONGO II:TRANSLATION AND GRAMMAR NOTES; MINNANO NIHONGO II: WORKBOOK. Assessment: exams (55%), class attendance (25%), writing performance (10%), and oral test (10%).

This course studies Machine Learning, an important sub-area of Artificial Intelligence. It is designed to help students understand some key technologies such as linear classifiers, support vector machines, decision trees and neural networks, through the process of applying them to actual data and developing Python programs. 

This course aims to instruct students on machine learning and basic skills on data processing. Students will be expected to read and write Python programs and modules by the end of the course.

Subsequent to Public Economics I, Public Economics II continues to analyze market failure and the function of the government, specifically what the government should do in a market economy. This course covers the basic principle of public economics, especially the role of the government and the rationale for the policy, in a framework of applied microeconomics. The course teaches the standard approach of public economics, which is the foundation of economic analysis in any policy issue. 

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In the 1950s, Noam Chomsky revolutionized the study of linguistics by treating language as something produced by the human brain. From this change in perspective, the study of language became an indirect way of studying the human mind. In addition to opening new ways to approach the subject, this change also built a foundation for doing linguistics as a science. Grammar is seen not as a known set of rules that people need to study to learn but rather as the rules that result from the human mind trying to make sense of the language it is exposed to. This course looks at three sub-areas of linguistics from this perspective: morphology (the study of word structure), phonetics (the study of the physical sounds of language), and phonology (the study of the structure of sounds in language).