Japanese

The first-year students of Japanese major need to study elementary Japanese. This semester, teachers mainly teach pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. It fosters and trains students to lay the foundation and explore their own learning methods.The textbook used in this course is the newly edited Japanese Volume 1, the 88th edition of "Standard Japanese" Elementary (Part 1) (Part 2). This semester aims to comprehensively improve students' listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills, while focusing on strengthening interactive exercises in class and strengthening their oral expression skills. 

Students can achieve JLPT N3 level after the completion of this semester's course. Also, Students

can be able to read general Japanese text materials, carry out basic daily life conversations, and write simple essays.

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. 

This course aims to help students learn spoken and written Japanese for academic purposes through a variety of familiar topics about society and culture. The target level is CEFR B1.1. Prerequisite: “J3:Japanese” or equivalent. Ten class hours/week. 

By the end of the course, students will be able to:
express their idea and understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters, 
exchange information, and understand and convey one’s feelings and intentions.

The purpose of this course is to learn how to express oneself in Japanese correctly. Taking "role-playing that simulates life in Japan" as the main axis, and supplemented by watching Japanese DVDs and playing games, it enhances Japanese conversation skills and deepens understanding of Japanese culture. The course particularly encourages a learning attitude of active participation and active speaking.

Modern Japanese literature is filled with ghosts and goblins--if only you know where to look. This course is designed as an introduction to the strangest, scariest, and wildest fiction in modern Japan, meaning that no prior knowledge of Japanese literature or Japanese history is required. The course begins at the "beginning" of modern Japanese literature in the late nineteenth century up to contemporary works and explores a range of ghost stories, fairy tales, as well as the literary equivalent of the splatter film. The course explores the following questions: How did the broad genre of today's 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 course is for students who have completed intermediate level studies but are advised to review the contents while at the same time studying at the advanced level. Students practice reading long and complex passages from literature including stories, essays and poetry. They study vocabulary, expressions and their usage in the texts, as well as learn about the authors of the literary works. The course helps students develop a deeper understanding of Japanese culture and way of thinking.