JAPN 312: Japanese for the Professions (MLO 1/Spring 2013)
Course Description
This course is designed to develop a functional use of Japanese for the professions such as education, business, research, technology, government, travel and hospitality. Students will learn how to respond to a variety of situations that focus on business manners such as customer service, telephone conversations and effective communication as a member of the business society.
Reflective Narrative
There are various degrees of politeness in Japanese conversation, and most students you could talk to are familiar with polite form (です・ます)or informal conversation (不通話), but there is one more speech form that we do not typically get to use in everyday situations, aka keigo (敬語). Through "Japanese for the Professions", we were granted a direct way to practice the more formal speech styles in a business setting. Our classes included studying set phrases which could only be used in certain contexts, practicing the basic and advanced forms of formal speech, and understanding how the status of yourself compared to another person could change how you were able to have a conversation with them. While this course did emphasize more formal aspects of Japanese, it was also indispensable in teaching us Japanese business culture.
For our midterm, we looked towards other countries and their individual business cultures as compared to both America and Japan. Near the end of the term, we gathered together the knowledge we had acquired into groups and used it to create a video illustrating a basic business scenario. Honorific Japanese is still a weak point for me as I did not have the ability, even while studying abroad, to make daily use out of the knowledge. As a future JET participant, I will be working in a Japanese environment where it will be essential for me to identify the work relationships and understand where my position is among my colleagues.
This course is designed to develop a functional use of Japanese for the professions such as education, business, research, technology, government, travel and hospitality. Students will learn how to respond to a variety of situations that focus on business manners such as customer service, telephone conversations and effective communication as a member of the business society.
Reflective Narrative
There are various degrees of politeness in Japanese conversation, and most students you could talk to are familiar with polite form (です・ます)or informal conversation (不通話), but there is one more speech form that we do not typically get to use in everyday situations, aka keigo (敬語). Through "Japanese for the Professions", we were granted a direct way to practice the more formal speech styles in a business setting. Our classes included studying set phrases which could only be used in certain contexts, practicing the basic and advanced forms of formal speech, and understanding how the status of yourself compared to another person could change how you were able to have a conversation with them. While this course did emphasize more formal aspects of Japanese, it was also indispensable in teaching us Japanese business culture.
For our midterm, we looked towards other countries and their individual business cultures as compared to both America and Japan. Near the end of the term, we gathered together the knowledge we had acquired into groups and used it to create a video illustrating a basic business scenario. Honorific Japanese is still a weak point for me as I did not have the ability, even while studying abroad, to make daily use out of the knowledge. As a future JET participant, I will be working in a Japanese environment where it will be essential for me to identify the work relationships and understand where my position is among my colleagues.
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File Size: | 445 kb |
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