JPNS W1001

Standard Japanese language workload. Quizzes every class. Language Lab and Homeworks each lesson.1 composition presentation. 2 exams and a final.

9 online assignments, worth a total of 15%, some involve posting written material or recording yourself speaking onto the class padlet. 2 online midterms (worth 15% total) and 1 online final exam (worth 15%), all open note, book, and courseworks page. Hiragana/Katakana assignments worth 10%. Before class quizzes are worth 10%, daily in class quizzes are worth 10% and grammar review quizzes are worth 4%. Attendance is worth 10% and participation is worth 11%. A 93%+ is an A. Grading is VERY fair. 2 hours 10 minutes each week for class, around 4-5 hours a week studying and completing assignments, so 6-7 hours a week toward this class total. It is a 2.5 credit course, so keep that in mind.

Near daily quizzes and HW, ~5-6 labs, 1 composition/oral presentation, ~2-3 midterms, 1 final.

At the beginning of the course, the student is slammed with a lot of unnecessary nonsense, including tons of papers to print out from a "Supplementary Materials" file. After Chapter 4, it is memorization of words and grammar in hiragana only. There will be homework every night either in the form of written assignments, listening labs, or memorizing Japanese itself. There also will be a quiz every session which is why memorizing the terms is crucial... The syllabus is very useful in organizing one's time. At the end, there will be a composition essay that is completely foreign to an introductory student and significant research outside of class will need to be done in order to ensure that the composition sounds appropriate and not foolish. It will need to be memorized and presented in front of the class. This is another factor that could certainly have been removed from the course. This did not teach me anything!! I could have used this time to practice writing sentences or something.

Hefty. DO NOT take this course because you "think it would be cool" to speak some Japanese. You will have ONE WEEK to learn all 60 plus characters of the hirigana writing set. You will then be expected to use it on every quiz and test and hw and it does take some time. You will have homework, every class - at least an hour and a half to two hours. And every other class you will have a lab due, which will take you between an hour and two hours in the basement of Lewisohn Hall, depending on how much time you spend. If you have the time, really do the labs meticulously, because the orals on the tests are similar to the lab excercises. You will also have a quiz EVERY SINGLE CLASS, on vocab and grammar. You cannot miss a class because you will miss the quiz and get a zero, and when you come back the next class, you'll fail the quiz on the grammar points covered while you were not there the class before. This class is ALOT of work for 2.5 credits. I found it to be worth it, but honestly, I did more work for these 2.5 credits than for any of my other regular 3 credit courses this semester. Only take this class if you have a genuine interest and you intend to go on. Otherwise, stick to Spanish or French - I've studied both and neither were this intense.

Nothing much. Memorizing the hiragana (the katakana is not taught in Elementary A) was practicaly the only challenge. I quite honestly spent no more than 10 hours on the course outside the classroom in the entire semester (not because I didn't like Japanese but because I had other work to do) and managed a B+, which was nothing great but definitely a lot better than what I'd get in another class if I put that ridiculously little amount of effort.

Park Sensei is a good teacher. She cares about her students and is really approachable. Although she teaches off the slides, but it is actually helpful that she tries to make students remember as much as possible in class, rather than spend extra time outside of classroom. She will ask students to practise as much as possible in class. Sometimes the style maybe a little repetitive and dry but I think it helps a lot especially for people who don't want to spend a lot of time after class to study.

Takahashi sensei is always willing to help out her students. She is very good at getting people to stay engaged, and sometimes mixed up seating so that we get to practice speaking with a fresh face. Our daily quizzes or other in class assignments would always be returned the next class, and online assignments and exams were also promptly returned. She is very understanding with students, and offers a lot of office hours for those who need them. Even if you are confused about something small she will never make you feel like you are bad or slow. The presentations are very helpful and are always accessible on Courseworks. The way that she organizes the Courseworks modules also makes things very clear. You watch a short grammar video and take an online quiz before every class, which helps make that lesson’s class go smoother since students already have a decent understanding of what is going to be covered. She also has very creative activities to practice new material, so classes never get boring or repetitive. She is also very willing to give extensions on assignments, and her main form of communication is through the class discord server. There is also sooo much supplementary material available on the course page. This class was very well paced, 1 lesson took about 3 class sessions. Each class had a short quiz with about 8-10 vocabulary words and 1 or 2 small grammar questions.…

Noguchi sensei is a good teacher, and did very well teaching Elem. Japanese A this past semester. She is patient when one makes mistakes (which tends to happen quite a bit since Japanese isn't the easiest to learn) and is pretty engaging in class. She is also able to get the class to respond pretty well when participation is required. So overall I would recommend her. As for Japanese itself, the language has a good flow but I'm left wondering who thought it would be a good (*&^ing idea to come up with 3 separate (*&^ing alphabets for the same (*&^ing language. With that said, it is definitely fun to learn.

Overall, Hamada sensei's class was a rough introduction to the Japanese language. To start, the class should have focused on hiragana and katakana before even touching the books, which were all in hiragana/katakana. The books themselves are quite useful, that is, if you know the script!. Hamada sensei provided "Supplementary Materials" on Courseworks, but believe me, they are not JUST supplementary by any stretch of the imagination. They are quite necessary, but should not have been! The class was introduced to the books BEFORE the student had any familiarity with hiragana or katakana, the supplementary materials were essential in order to print out a romanized portion of the book, which included chapters 1-4. This was only the beginning of what would be an unnecessarily lengthy and confusing "introduction" to the class let alone the language. That's the last thing anyone needs as the semester "evolves" later on. Familiarization of BOTH writing scripts are absolutely crucial before embarking within the unfamiliar territory of Japanese. During class, hiragana was the first thing we were introduced to. Unfortunately, the class was instructed that memorizing the katakana was OPTIONAL. This would have created a complete catastrophe (in our class at least) if one chose not to memorize it. I'll explain my reasons for this further on. This particular class with Hamada sensei did not…