This year is a special one for students of Japanese at Berkeley; itŐs the 50th anniversary of the Center for Japanese Studies on campus, one of the oldest and most active research centers in the nation for the study of Japan. Yoko Hasegawa, Associate Professor and Japanese Language Coordinator, describes what students in this year's summer session will encounter in the three levels of Modern Japanese taught at Berkeley. In the elementary course, Hasegawa writes, "All basic grammatical constructions are taught as early as possible to enable the students to use the language in real situations. This methodology helps students understand the structural organization of the language: they can see the similarities and differences among various grammatical constructions. The classroom instruction is exclusively in Japanese from the very beginning." By the end of this course, students this summer will be able to read and write all hiragana and katakana and approximately 300 kanji. In the intermediate course, Hasegawa writes, "Vocabulary is expanded to express and comprehend complex thoughts in a manner appropriate for many social situations; an increasing amount of reading and writing is included. Students begin using kanji dictionaries and Japanese word processing software, and they do projects using information obtained through the Internet." Course participants learn to read and write approximately 400 new kanji and their compounds and to read and write longer, more structured compositions. In the advanced course, materials include not only textbooks but also newspapers, radio news, and short stories used to provide insight into Japanese culture and society. "Projects and oral presentations are incorporated," explains Hasegawa, "to enable interaction via e-mail and Web-based information retrieval activities with students at Japanese universities." Students learn to read and write approximately 400 new kanji and their compounds, bringing their command to an approximate total of 1100. "The overall competence of our third-level students," Hasegawa notes, "matches those who have studied Japanese elsewhere for 4 years."
The San Francisco Bay Area, home to a large and diverse Asian-American and Asian Pacific community, provides many amenities of special interest of Japanese language ane culture. Japanes films are frequently shown off campus, and the campus Pacific Film Archive maintains one of the largest collections of Asian films in the world. There is regular programming in Japanese on local television channels. There are many Japanese bookstores and innumerable Japanese restaurants and markets. There are also excellent permanent collections of Asian art, as well as frequent special exhibitions at the University Art Museum on campus, the Asian Art Museum and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University.
