Objectives
Japan is an exciting country, maintaining fascinating traditional culture while fully embracing modernity and technology. Aspects of its culture, ranging from cinema, literature and manga to martial arts, continue to be an important influence on the West The four-year degree course combines intensive study of the Japanese language with Spanish and a selection of lecture-based modules on Spain, Latin America, Japan and East Asia. The third year of the course is spent at one of our partner universities in Japan, providing an excellent opportunity to enhance your language skills and to immerse yourself in Japanese society. The Japanese language is taught intensively from scratch, covering all the necessary skills: speaking, listening, reading and writing. You learn the phonetic scripts (kana) from the outset, and learn the roughly 2000 Sino-Japanese characters (kanji) needed over the four years of the course. You encounter over a quarter of these in the first year. By the end of the first year you will have covered most of the core grammar of the language, and from the second year of the course you start to deal with real texts, including newspapers, and you develop compositional, summary, translation and presentational skills in the language. The Japan-related lecture-based modules cover a range of disciplines, so you can choose modules on contemporary society, literature, cinema, minorities, politics, economics, gender, modern history, business management or international relations. There are also some modules dedicated to reading Japanese literature in the original language, including both modern literature and the pre-modern language. On the Spanish side you develop your written and oral fluency in Spanish, supported by small-group learning on a weekly basis and by language laboratory, video and satellite TV facilities as well as weekly classes with native speakers. The School of East Asian Studies is one of the main centres for Japanese in Europe, and is one of two universities' departments that constitute the National Institute of Japanese Studies.