Japanese

<Level V>
Target Students: Those who have partially completed intermediate level studies.
Course Goals: To develop understanding and command of the 200 important intermediate sentence patterns for further improvement of the four skills of reading, listening, speaking, and writing. To master the 6,000 basic words and 1,000 to 1,200 basic Chinese characters.

<Reading Comprehension A>
Goal: To understand slightly complex passages and sentence structures.
Contents: Reading of upper intermediate level passages on current topics, such as newspaper articles.

<Level VII>
Target Students: Those who have completed and mastered intermediate level studies.
Course Goals: To master the 200 important intermediate sentence patterns and develop understanding and command of the 100 important advanced sentence patterns for further improvement of the four skills of reading, listening, speaking, and writing. To master the 10,000 basic words and 2,000 basic Chinese characters.

<Oral Expression B>
Goal: To develop oral expression skills for dialogues such as discussion or debates.
Contents: Conducting discussions and debates on various themes.

This Japanese language course is designed for students who have completed Japanese III at ICU and have mastered basic skills. It is comparable to third and beginning fourth year at UC. The course continues the development of skills in listening, reading, and writing. By the end of the course, students should be able to communicate in intermediate Japanese incorporating fundamental knowledge of Japanese culture.

This course is designed for students at the advanced levels to acquire comprehensive Japanese language proficiency. The purpose of the course is to increase student knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, and kanji and to improve their reading and writing ability through close-reading of textbooks. In addition, students will develop speech techniques necessary to participate in discussions and to explain content that they have understood.

<Level V>
Target Students: Those who have partially completed intermediate level studies.
Course Goals: To develop understanding and command of the 200 important intermediate sentence patterns for further improvement of the four skills of reading, listening, speaking, and writing. To master the 6,000 basic words and 1,000 to 1,200 basic Chinese characters.

<Written Expression A>
Goal: To be able to write well-formed passages of approximately 800 words in length.
Contents: Writing letters and simple essays on topics familiar to students.

This course is for students with at least one year of prior study of Japanese. The goal of this course is for students to acquire well-balanced basic proficiency in listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and to develop an understanding and command of basic grammar and its usage. Students practice listening comprehension and pronunciation using videotapes and CDs. They learn conversational expressions and phrases necessary in daily life, fundamentals of written expression, and how to read and write short passages on topics familiar to them using previously learned sentence patterns and vocabulary. By the end of term, students master 1500 basic words and 300 basic kanji. 

This course is designed for students learning Japanese for the first time. The course focuses on the acquisition of grammar and sentence patterns based on the textbook Elementary Japanese for Academic Purposes Vol.1 (Lesson 1 to 6). Students must understand hiragana before taking this course.

<Level V>
Target Students: Those who have partially completed intermediate level studies.
Course Goals: To develop understanding and command of the 200 important intermediate sentence patterns for further improvement of the four skills of reading, listening, speaking, and writing. To master the 6,000 basic words and 1,000 to 1,200 basic Chinese characters.

<General 1-5>
Goal: To develop balanced, intermediate-level proficiency in reading, listening, speaking, and writing.
Contents: Learning the 100 important intermediate sentence patterns and vocabulary and improving reading comprehension with an upper intermediate level textbook. Developing command of intermediate Japanese through short sentence composition exercises. Mastering the points learnt at the intermediate level to proceed to the advanced level smoothly. Increasing vocabulary by learning both the words introduced in the textbook as well as additional related words.
Improving the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing by understanding the textbook and exchanging opinions on it.

Modern Japanese literature is filled with ghosts and goblins—if you know where to look. This introductory course surveys some of the strangest, scariest, and wildest fiction in modern Japan. The course begins at the “beginning” of modern Japanese literature in the late nineteenth century up through more contemporary works, with the stories ranging from ghost stories and fairy tales to the literary equivalent of the splatter film.

The course addresses the following questions: How did the broad genre of what is today known in Japanese as gensō bungaku (roughly corresponding to supernatural, horror, and fantasy genres), emerge and develop as a set of assumptions about the nature of modern life in Japan? How do these assumptions challenge our way of interacting with the world, with other people, and ultimately with our own sense of self? What kind of new understandings of various boundaries—between the real and the unreal, the present and the past, the foreign and the native, the living and the dead—might these stories suggest? And how are these texts part of a larger global network of weird fiction—what, in other words, does it mean to call a Japanese text “Gothic”?

This class requires a significant amount of reading outside of class.

<Level VII>

Target Students: Those who have completed and mastered intermediate-level studies.

Course Goals: To master the 200 important intermediate sentence patterns and develop understanding and command of the 100 important advanced sentence patterns for further improvement of the four skills of reading, listening, speaking, and writing. To master the 10,000 basic words and 2,000 basic Chinese characters.

<General 1-5>

Goal: To develop a balanced, advanced level of proficiency in reading, listening, speaking, and writing.

Contents: Mastery of intermediate sentence patterns and introduction of 100 important advanced sentence patterns, using Doshisha University’s original textbook and support materials. For students to be able to use all the expressions in an appropriate manner, exercises will be of typical situations where each expression is used, without categorizing them into grammar or vocabulary issues. Vocabulary building with an emphasis on collocation. Improving the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing through summarizing, reading, and listening comprehension of the materials; role-play using expressions learned in class, and composition exercises.