Japanese History |
Fall 2014
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Course Information
JAPN 302
MLO 1: Language & Communication MLO 2: Culture Course Description
This course further develops advanced Japanese proficiency through an understanding of Japanese history as a dynamic, interrelated system and employs a variety of processes to identify, analyze and evaluate cultural themes, values and ideas. Students will demonstrate ability to accurately comprehend ideas across a range of historical content.
Course Work
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Reflective Narrative
This was the first course I took taught in Japanese that was not a language/grammar-based class; it was certainly difficult, but I feel that I also improved quite a bit this semester. Because there was no focus to learn new grammar each lesson, instead I was able to apply all of the grammar that I already knew and see it in action in the readings. I was also able to improve my vocabulary with topic-relevant terms that might not have been covered in a regular grammar class, such as in the haiku activity.
In this course, we worked from a Japanese history textbook made for people learning Japanese. All of the passages, comprehension questions, and opinion questions were all in Japanese, but there was a convenient vocabulary tool that expedited the lookup of unfamiliar words. In addition, every week we wrote and then discussed our responses to the comprehension and opinion questions. I found that writing my opinions were more difficult than the comprehension questions; sometimes it was difficult enough to formulate a response in English, let alone Japanese. However, I think it was the forum-based nature of the responses that was most helpful because I was able to read older students' responses and receive corrections on my work as well. At the end of the semester we had to expand on something we read in the textbook for our final presentation, and I chose to look into foreign loanwords in Japanese. This presentation was probably the first time I used Japanese sources for a presentation, but I imagine I will continue to do so for future presentations as well. |