Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/UC Berkeley/Reading Japanese Texts (Fall 2023)

This course is designed for those at a higher-intermediate to lower-advanced level of fluency in Japanese to amplify their reading proficiency through a detailed grammatical analysis of the text.

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 grammar. Moreover, learners tend to focus their attention 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 its words.

By translating Japanese Wikipedia articles into English and posting them on the English Wikipedia, 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 difficulty levels of these assignments are compatible with those that appear in the N2 to N1 level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test 日本語能力試験, a standardized test under the auspices of the Japan Foundation and Japan Educational Exchanges and Services, to evaluate the examinee’s Japanese language proficiency. The course is also suitable for graduate students preparing for their language exams.

The course is conducted in Japanese and English, and students’ comprehension will be examined and analyzed in terms of Japanese-to-English translation. This bilingual teaching method enables students to raise questions without linguistic restriction vis-à-vis when a course is taught exclusively in Japanese.

Prerequisites: J10B or equivalent; native or near-native fluency in written English.

There will be weekly homework assignments and a take-home final exam.