Fall Class Final Impressions

Here are off-the-top-of-my-head impressions of my second and final semester at Waseda University's intensive Japanese program.


Kanji learning through the media 5-6

This class was consistently interesting and useful. I'm not sure how much "through the media" was involved per se, but we did look at a couple news articles and viewed a couple TV clips. Honestly I guess I'm glad we focused mostly on "kanji learning" and less on "media" so what I am even talking about? After the halfway point in the semester we suddenly had to do some group assignments and a couple writing tasks, which seemed kind of random, but the main formula of studying a bunch of kanji and having a quiz was upheld throughout. The final is tomorrow morning, so I'll be at the local study pit flashing them cards at about 5 am or so ;D

Japanese Sentence Patterns for Communication (1) 6

This class ended up being a super downer. I don't think it's the fault of the student teachers, I think it's because we raced through material, were tasked with a lot of homework that was never individually checked, and that the single test we took (yeah, no quizzes, no tests, no midterm) was the final exam. I get the results tomorrow. Should survive, but man... I liked the the grammar class I took last semester much better just in terms of the fact that we got feedback on homework and had a midterm. Just overall less frantic. Also, I hate writing assignments where you have to shoehorn in a lot of specific grammar structures. You end up thinking in a small box that tends to skew you towards using the grammar in a way you think you can than just expressing yourself or concentrating on sounding most natural.


Writing Correspondence: Letters and E-mails 5-7

Glad I dropped the Miyazaki class in favor of this. It was indeed challenging, and sometimes painfully boring (the teacher often just read handouts to us), but the information we received will be great reference material for...ever? I kind of wish our prof had just had us buy the textbook instead of receiving loose copied pages every week.



Explore the Essence of Japanese Classic Novels 5-6

This class went exactly as I expected. Totally worth the effort, but the extra cultural activities made it more stressful than it needed to be. Over winter break I read Botchan in the original Japanese. Pretty sweet achievement. Giving a final presentation on that with a group on Monday.

Kanji in the Contemporary World 6-8

I feel like...I did not get to put as much time into this class as I wanted. There were a lot of kanji I had never seen before and although I managed to perform for the exams and mostly kept up with the homework, actually studying (outside of cramming for the two exams) did not really happen in a timely way, and even the studying I did was not as in-depth as I wanted. Luckily, I have the entire rest of my life to keep studying kanji. THAT is exciting. Other than that...each class had some kind of kanji related lecture, mostly given by student teachers. Some of them were more interesting and useful than others. My favorite one was about the markers they used to put next to Chinese characters to read them in Japanese. I may look into that some more on my own.

Intensive Japanese 6

Welp. I have mixed feelings. I think after improving an insane amount last semester things were bound to slow down a little bit, and since we were using the same textbook, the stuff we were studying was not dramatically different or harder, and in fact, lots of it ended up being review. The end of the semester we spent about a month on the same topic and that was really, really boring. We wrote a paper, read everyone's papers, then rewrote, read everyone's new papers. So we have already been through our own and everyone else's content twice. It was not that interesting to begin with. Then we had to do a speech. By that point my attitude was sort of bending in the wrong direction and I didn't have a whole lot of motivation left. I drew some cool visual aids, but the speech itself was pretty slapdash. I think overall my grade will be ok. Anyways, part of me wishes there were more of a clear difference between the levels...


Critical Reading 5-6

This class was horribly misnamed, lol. We basically read some essays or excerpts from non-fiction books and used them as a foundation for class discussion. So really, it was a critical thinking/discussing class and had very little to do with reading or learning Japanese. We practiced our Japanese a lot, but we practiced thinking a lot more. Questions involving country, nationality, how we define and practice friendship, etc. Some people found it really difficult to think about these issues, and the discussion was pretty interesting, but honestly I was hoping we would read a lot more.

 
Refining Your Japanese Pronunciation with Ondoku & Shadowing 6-8

The first time I ever took a translation class. It was pretty depressing, haha. Pronunciation is a grueling road. It was interesting to get to practice a lot of different types of reading/shadowing, from short stories, to radio dramas, news, commercials, etc. For my final project I edited a monologue about what a pain in the neck children can be to 90 seconds and gave it my best shot. I think most likely the reflection worksheet will be scrutinized harder than more than our performances.

Listening Comprehension: Improving Accuracy in News Listening 6-7

Our teacher for this class was so amusing. Leading the class play-by-play like a sports newscaster. Things were a little frenetic, but we certainly did dictation every week. Not sure how much I really learned from this class. I guess some vocab, and kept an eye on Abe's return to the Prime Minister-ship than I would have otherwise...maybe.


Reading and Discussing Novels by Contemporary Writers 6-8

I liked this class. Unlike Critical Reading it was almost perfectly true to its name. We read many pages and we discussed a ton. We also had to create leaflets at the end. So many of my classes this semester turned into art classes at the end it was a little goofy, but so it goes. The project was more fun than I thought, even though again we had to take a month with one topic. But no, thinking over it, that was fine in this case. The only thing that genuinely annoyed me about this class was that for the fifth short story we all had to read something and then propose it to class. In the end, two works were chosen and we could make our decision which group to be in for the presentation. Alas, BOTH of the works that got voted up were Murakami. Even though we read Murakami as the first story of the class. I seriously think there needs to be a rule that it can't be an author we already read. That's slightly hypocritical because I was interested in reading the sequel to Kitchen (Banana Yoshimoto) but I'm fine with doing that on my own. I think in a survey class you need variety. Plus everyone knows Murakami and everyone has probably read him thoroughly in their own language already. No one needs to learn who Murakami is and what kinds of things he writes. Not that I didn't enjoy reading more of his stuff in the original Japanese, just that there are so many writers I have never heard of...

Japanese Idioms 5-7

This class was a little strange. The teacher had this sort of spacy personality. We learned a lot, but then the quizzes always felt a little unsettling, like we really had to try to get inside our teacher's head and think what she would want us to put. Like one day she was explaining an answer to a question lots of people missed and was like, "So Japanese people think [x] when [y] happens, therefore this is correct." And it's like ok but remember we are not Japanese so we would not necessarily think the same way...it was not something we could have known from the lectures in class. Anyways, it was a good introduction to idioms. I'll look forward to doing more on my own.

Overall this semester was wayyyyyy more time consuming in terms of studying and homework than the first one. In the first semester we were often reading IN class and then there was no homework. This time all the reading was shoveled to the afterschool hours. Taking both lit surveys at once was a little nuts. Taking both kanji classes at once was a little nuts. I don't regret it, but it was a challenge. Part of me wishes I could do another year, but the rest is really ready to get some work experience. I'm gonna post some more random thoughts/advice to prospective study abroaders after school ends for real on Tuesday.