How strong is the Japanese program?

Riks
Sun, 12 Jul 2009 13:08:22 +0000

My friend’s roommate is a Japanese major. She will spend her upcoming junior school year in Kyoto. She loves the Japanese program at Boston University, along with the general East Asian studies. I believe she is also studying Chinese and Korean.

I have much less experience with the program; I took two semesters of Japanese with the same professor and enjoyed it immensely. I think all of the professors teach the same curriculum in the language classes. (I can’t comment on the Japanese literature classes.)

In my classes speaking played a large role. We had a textbook which was the source of all of the course material, but it was fairly easy to understand, and I don’t think anyone disliked using it. We did use the text book for some reading, but we did far more speaking than reading. Once we learned new grammar our professor made sure we understood it by verbally practicing it.

I had Hatano-sensei for a professor. She is incredibly nice and a bit goofy. She was also not as strict as other professors when it came to remembering kanji (a positive or negative aspect?).