Orientation and Schedule On the first day of school, an orientation was held to go over what was expected of us as students and what kind of courses were available to us. We then took placement exams so that they could determine what our expected level of Japanese was and what were the appropriate classes to take. I felt that my evaluation was accurate as I had tried to attend a class that was one level higher and could not understand what was going on, so I took the recommended level of Japanese for me. My overall class schedule ended up being 17 units and looked something like this: Monday: Iaido Tuesday: Intensive Japanese Wednesday: Japanese Culture and Education Thursday: Intensive Japanese, Linguistics 1, Japanese Subcultures, Homelessness Friday: Intensive Japanese Online: Japan in the World DescriptionsIaido was a Japanese martial arts course in which we learned the art of sword drawing and how to do several patterns with both a wooden and replica sword. This was one of my more favorite electives because of the interactivity of it and the fact that you get to learn how to use a sword in Iaido. The sensei was also an older gentleman that would bring us sweets from his travels and said that "in Iaido, you will always win".
Homelessness was a course that mainly consisted of volunteering every other week at a local organization that helped provide provisions and other services for the homeless population throughout the year. It was a very eye opening experience to see the issue of homelessness in Japan firsthand. Japan in the World had all of the incoming international students in my program conduct research on some aspect of Japan and compare it to their own country. This included drafting a research paper as well as giving presentations at the the end of the semester. I had done mine on comparing American and Japanese fast food, and some other examples of possible topics were a comparison of plus sized fashion between the U.S. and Japan and another was a comparison on Japanese and American cinema. Japanese Culture and Education was a course that introduced exactly that: culture and education. The teacher would give us field trips of nearby areas throughout the semester and would give tours of the area explaining the history behind each part, which helped get me and my friends started on being more comfortable exploring areas of Yokohama. She also discussed different learning/teaching techniques and has us teach about a topic of our choice following a certain model of teaching. Japanese Subcultures mainly discussed the formation of various subcultures in Japan’s recent history with an emphasis on manga and anime subcultures. This was a casual lecture style class and very informative on the subject matter and it showed through the teacher’s enthusiasm. Linguistics 1 was a class I had planned to take even before arriving in Japan as it would count toward my degree as well as being an interesting subject matter. I had no prior knowledge of linguistics, so this introductory class was perfect for my level of understanding while still being challenging to me. We covered topics such as morphology, phonetics, and syntax. The Japanese course I took that semester was Intensive Japanese. Although it had a lot of homework, in-class assignments, projects, speeches, quizzes, exams, and presentations, I thought it had helped me greatly improve my Japanese language skills. Some of the material was slight overlap from previous years of my education, but the majority of the content was new and I felt confident about the material at the end of the semester. Comments are closed.
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AuthorI am Kyle Sablan and I studied abroad at Yokohama National University (YNU) during the 2016-2017 academic year. This blog was created as one of the requirements for receiving the Gilman Scholarship. The purpose of this blog is to share my personal experience with everybody and encourage interest in studying abroad. Archives
April 2018
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