Japanese 101C

I’ve had Ikeda before, for intermediate/advanced Japanese, and he was great then. At that level, it’s not that bad because you have a textbook that comes with drills and homework, and your biggest projects are skits, speeches, and short essays. There’s one midterm and one final.

Advanced reading and writing, though, is something entirely else. For starters, I expected that we would be reading novels or short stories and be writing responses or reflection papers or something of that nature. Nope. The topics of this class for spring 2013 were misused words, youth-speak/vocabulary, metaphorical language (can you explain to me what metonymy is in English? Can you do it in Japanese? uhh), and dialects. All the readings were extremely technical and contained tons and tons of kanji I had never seen before (I’m above-average at reading comprehension, but 5-7 pages of this stuff would take me at least a couple of days, if not more, to get through if I didn’t want to go crazy), which I guess explains the “reading” part of the class’s name.

But writing? Not much writing here. There are NO homework assignments. Great, you might think. Except no. The midterms (there were two!) have questions that would have been great to have on homework assignments beforehand to ensure that you understood the topics. Luckily Ikeda is a pretty easy grader, at least in comparison to Kawanishi and Nogami, so even though I fumbled a bit on explaining why this particular phrase was a synecdoche, I did alright. Still, even if you sit through every class and write down notes furiously, you might still come up on several questions on the tests and realize you have no idea how to explain the answer (if you have the foggiest idea HOW to answer at all). Homework honestly would have helped in cementing the material, even if he occasionally handed out in-class work for us to do together and explained it afterwards.

Also, there is a final paper. This one sneaks up on you, because Ikeda stresses it at the start of the quarter, then barely mentions it for the next six or seven weeks, and then suddenly you realize you have a bunch of term papers and projects all due in ninth/tenth week and whoa I have a Japanese paper?! When did that happen? He also gives absolutely zero guidance beforehand on where to find sources or articles. Other professors will give you very helpful handouts about online journals and that sort of thing, but nope. You’re left to fend for yourself here. Yes, you could go to his office hours with a paper idea and hopefully he could guide you in the right direction, but you’re really left on your own on this one. He assumed his syllabus explained everything (it didn’t) and so didn’t make an announcement about it until ninth week, after a bunch of us started pestering him about the paper. The lack of writing assignments doesn’t help here, either, as you’ve gone a whole quarter with ZERO formal writing practice.

All this is not to say that Ikeda is a terrible guy, like some professors. He’s a funny person (funny as in “makes jokes often” as well as “kind of weird”) and rather lenient on a lot of things, especially grading. But he was always ten minutes late to our class (some excuse about needing to go up to his office before come to our class, but honestly how does that take more than 20 minutes?) and often left us to our own devices when he had us break up into groups to discuss the readings. Like he would just leave and come back ten minutes later with drinks and snacks for himself. He could definitely use some more structure and organization to his upper division classes. We aren’t just talking about the basics of Japanese culture at this level; we’re discussing stuff the average native speaker would have difficulty explaining, with or without all the technical definitions.

So if you really want to get better in your fluency, I’d recommend Kawanishi (she’s actually a much nicer grader than you might think) or Nogami. I don’t feel like I really learned anything super useful in this class, in terms of content, kanji, or writing ability. I love Ikeda, but this class with him was kind of a joke.