JAPN 201: Intermediate Japanese 1
In this course...
Description: Students will continue to develop proficiency in intermediate Japanese. Students will communicate interpersonally and interpretively and present on familiar topics in daily situations. Students will further develop communication strategies and demonstrate an increased appreciation of Japanese customs, practices, products, and perspectives, and are able to compare them with their own. Highly interactive with technology enhanced content.
Description: Students will continue to develop proficiency in intermediate Japanese. Students will communicate interpersonally and interpretively and present on familiar topics in daily situations. Students will further develop communication strategies and demonstrate an increased appreciation of Japanese customs, practices, products, and perspectives, and are able to compare them with their own. Highly interactive with technology enhanced content.
Reflection: Before taking this course, it had been almost a year and a half since I was enrolled in a Japanese course for academic purposes. During this year and a half period, I continued to study Japanese through passive means such as acquiring vocabulary, learning helpful grammatical constructions, and by translating the contexts of texts that interested me. However, all of this was done primarily by myself, and as such, my skills did not develop much in terms of speaking or listening for the most applicable realtime linguistic situation: conversation.
Through the struggle of having to apply all that I had learned while simultaneously learning and applying new material, I can say with certainty acquiring a new language is far less a quantitative experience (learning thousands of chines characters, memorizing all of the conjugations patterns, etc.) and much more of a qualitative one. What I mean by this is through my daily studies I uncover new facets about already learned material, which then becomes readily accessible in conversation.
With that being said, my first encounter with a Japanese exchange student happened only a few weeks after I began taking this course. Much to my surprise, I was able to apply everything I had already learned in class, albeit in a sloppy fashion. This exchange student could not use English very well either, but we were still able to carry on something akin to a conversation. And from there, my Japanese only continued to improve.
My ability to understand the contents of full dialogues, to make competent use of all the grammar in spoken conversation I have learned from this course, and to tackle more specialized topics in a presentational context, all of these have tremendously improved.
Looking back now on the end of the semester, I have taken part in plenty of Japanese conversations, and although I continue to ask many questions, and there are still many misunderstandings, I can still make use of my Japanese confidently while bearing in mind that I can and will learn from my mistakes.
Through the struggle of having to apply all that I had learned while simultaneously learning and applying new material, I can say with certainty acquiring a new language is far less a quantitative experience (learning thousands of chines characters, memorizing all of the conjugations patterns, etc.) and much more of a qualitative one. What I mean by this is through my daily studies I uncover new facets about already learned material, which then becomes readily accessible in conversation.
With that being said, my first encounter with a Japanese exchange student happened only a few weeks after I began taking this course. Much to my surprise, I was able to apply everything I had already learned in class, albeit in a sloppy fashion. This exchange student could not use English very well either, but we were still able to carry on something akin to a conversation. And from there, my Japanese only continued to improve.
My ability to understand the contents of full dialogues, to make competent use of all the grammar in spoken conversation I have learned from this course, and to tackle more specialized topics in a presentational context, all of these have tremendously improved.
Looking back now on the end of the semester, I have taken part in plenty of Japanese conversations, and although I continue to ask many questions, and there are still many misunderstandings, I can still make use of my Japanese confidently while bearing in mind that I can and will learn from my mistakes.