Navigation

• Main
• Courses
  • Beginning Japanese
  • Intermediate Japanese
  • Readings in the Japanese Language
• Faculty
  • Kuniko Katz
  • Herschel Miller
  • Sayuri Oyama
• Resources

Readings in the Japanese Language: Course Description

Instructor: Herschel Miller
Level: Advanced
Semester: Fall

This course is not for native readers of Japanese but for third-year Japanese language students. It will use both a standard language textbook and also a selection of actual texts (mostly literary) written in Japanese for native Japanese readers. We will adopt a three-pronged strategy: first, guided readings from a textbook, with memorization of grammar patterns, vocabulary, and kanji; second, selected shorter texts to be closely read and precisely translated into English; and third, one or more longer texts to be swiftly read through for general comprehension and summarized rather than translated. Students will need both a good electronic dictionary and a copy of Andrew N. Nelson’s Japanese-English Character Dictionary. After a rapid introduction to kanji lookup skills and a review of the more important radicals, we will dive right into our short readings, starting also on a longer text to be read for general comprehension only.