Course Orientation / Syllabus

JAPANESE 101.51/102.51/103.51/104.51

• 1. Objectives
• 2. Outline
• 3. Procedure
• 3.1 Self-study
• 3.1.1 Materials
• 3.1.2 What to do: the basics
• 3.1.3 Support for self-study
• 3.2 Making appointments
• 3.3 Interviews
• 4. Grading policy
• 5. Credit/Credit Adjustment

Important Information

• All email sent from Japanese I.I. will go to your OSU email address. Make sure you check your OSU email account on a regular basis.
• If you want to take placement test, please contact Ms. Yuko Kuwai for more information.
• You can make appointments online starting at 9:00 PM on Monday for the following week. You may schedule up to 2 sessions per day, 5 sessions per week.
• Appointments can be canceled online without penalty up until 24 hours prior to the appointment.
• Last day to change the number of credits: Friday of the 6th week. Until the end of the 6th week of classes, you may change the number of enrolled credit hours. (see 7 for detailed procedures how to change credit)
• Last day of individual sessions: the last Friday of classes. (No sessions during the exam week.)
• If you are not able to finish what you contracted, reduce your credit hours before the end of the sixth week. Japanese I.I. does not issue "I" (incomplete). For any incomplete course, an E will be entered as your grade. It is your responsibility to pace yourself so that you are not left with an E.

1. COURSE OBJECTIVES

This program aims to provide you with the necessary foundations for communicating in the type(s) of Japanese language that adult speakers of Japanese use in their normal lives, and that you will be able to use in business, academia, and many other settings.

Communication skills: We believe that the ultimate goal of learning a foreign language is comfortable and culturally coherent communication with native speakers; reaching that goal requires not only knowledge about the language but also the skills and intuitions necessary to use it in a linguistically and culturally appropriate way. Therefore, we emphasize spoken language, especially at the beginning level, and we will always stress the importance of acquiring new 'communicative moves' while working with language securely rooted in realistic communicative contexts. This course will require your very active participation. You will be graded based solely upon your ability to actually communicate in a culturally coherent way using Japanese. Your knowledge about the language will serve as a very important tool in improving proficiency, but it will never be the end goal. You won't be graded on what you know, but rather on what you are able to do.

Below is a more specific list of some of the goals we expect you to meet in each of our Japanese I.I. courses.

Goals for Japanese 101.51:
1. Hearing and producing the sounds of Japanese accurately;
2. Handling basic interaction skills, such as greetings, invitations, evaluations, apologies, and identification;
3. Learning to incorporate cultural factors that are reflected in language use, such as social hierarchy, familiarity, and group concepts;
4. Understanding the basic features of the written language; and
5. Reading items written in katakana.

Goals for Japanese 102.51 (in addition to the above):
6. Gaining skills for interaction involving requests, expression of possibilities, description of locations and directions, and comparisons; and
7. reading and writing notes, messages, and other materials of daily use written in hiragana and katakana.

Goals for Japanese 103. 51 (in addition to the above):
8. Gaining skills in interaction, including requests, invitations, requesting and giving directions, expressing time of occurrence and duration of time, change of state, and making self-introductions.
9. Expanding your repertoire by learning polite forms (honorific and humble), casual style (direct forms), and a different focus for presenting information (extended predicate);
10. Developing more strategies for smooth interaction; and
11. reading and writing texts written in hiragana, katakana, and kanji.

Goals for Japanese 104.51 (in addition to above):
12. Learning to discuss states, conditions, and ongoing or repeated actions; refining your ability to compare and contrast options; learning to discuss relative qualities of various items (e.g. 'this one is not as good at that one'); learning to discuss family members.
13. Learning to conduct formal introductions and greetings.
14. Developing more refined and global reading and writing skills allowing nuance of message to be both understood and conveyed in written Japanese.

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Japanese Individualized Instruction is a SELF-STUDY program: The I.I. Program shares its philosophy and materials with the regular Japanese courses, so students can transfer to a course in the regular track knowing that the content covered will be the same. However, the courses in the I.I. Program do not meet on a regular basis as in the regular track, and the time and frequency of appointments are entirely determined on an individual basis. Since there will not be scheduled classes, students are expected to do most of the learning on their own.

Basic procedures involved in Individualized Instruction (more detail to follow):

Step 1: SELF-STUDY (2 hours for an interview)(See Section 3.1)
Materials needed: