Japanese

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. 

The course introduces the Japanese sound system, basic greetings as well as a number of basic Japanese structures and vocabulary expressed in Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries that are essential to basic Japanese communication. They are taught through five social/cultural topics following the textbook, Nakama Book 1a chapters, which include: greetings and introductions, discussion of daily routines, discussion of Japanese cities, discussion of Japanese homes, and discussion of leisure time. In each topic, while studying the language, students are challenged to discover different approaches to viewing the world around them linguistically and culturally, and are given the opportunity to understand current sociocultural issues in Japan. They are also inducted into the learning routine necessary to succeed in the fast-paced learning of a foreign language.

This course is designed for students who have already learned the first half of elementary- level grammar. It aims to enhance one’s reading and writing skills, as well as the ability to use elementary-level vocabulary and grammar. 

The course design is based on sentence structures and grammatical patterns learned in the textbook, Elementary Japanese for Academic Purposes Vol.2 (Lesson 19 to 24). 

This course is for students who have completed intermediate level studies but are advised to review the contents concurrently with their studies at the advanced level.  The course focuses mainly on reading newspaper articles on current topics such as society, culture, science, politics, and sports, developing one's ability to find keywords; infer direction, and grasp the main idea.  The course also aims to deepen students' understanding of Japanese social issues.