Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/UC Berkeley/Reading Japanese Texts (Fall)

This course is designed for those at a higher-intermediate to lower-advanced level of fluency in Japanese to amplify their reading proficiency through detailed grammatical analyses of texts. Although adequate knowledge of both vocabulary and grammar is essential for text understanding, it has been noted that in foreign-language learning, vocabulary typically receives more emphasis than does grammar. Moreover, learners tend to focus on “content words,” typically nouns and verbs, and neglect structural cues. Therefore, they sometimes fail to grasp the text’s overall meaning, even when they know the meanings of all of its words.

By reading assigned texts, students in this course learn through a hands-on approach how words are combined to form a phrase, how phrases are combined to form a clause, how clauses are combined to form a sentence, and how sentences are combined to create a text. The assigned readings are selected from modern Japanese writing on current affairs, social sciences, history, and literature. The difficulty levels of these assignments are compatible with those that appear in the N2 to N1 level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, a standardized test under the auspices of the Japan Foundation and Japan Educational Exchanges and Services, to evaluate a person’s Japanese language proficiency. The course is also suitable for graduate students preparing for their language exams.