Languages of Japan & Korea at SOAS: Japanese
Japanese, a major language of the world, with more than 120 million native speakers, is thought to have connections with the Altaic group of languages (including Korean and Mongolian) in northern Asia. It is often assumed that Japanese must be a close cousin of Chinese, and the writing system does derive from that of Chinese. They are, however, entirely unrelated genetically, although Chinese has influenced Japanese. Japanese is considered to be a difficult language, but it will be reassuring to discover that in terms of pronunciation, spoken Japanese is actually very accessible and not particularly hard to master. The main challenge comes in getting to grips with a large alien vocabulary and a writing system that is undoubtedly the most complex in the world today - one which uses Chinese characters in combination with two distinct home-grown Japanese writing systems. Japanese is popular for the study of its culture and because of its economic importance.
If you would like to learn Japanese, contact either Professor Drew Gerstle (ag4@soas.ac.uk) or Mr Alan Cummings (ac50@soas.ac.uk) (Department of Japan and Korea)
Degree Programmes
- BA Japanese
- BA Japanese and ...
- BA Japanese Studies
- BA Japanese Studies and ...
- MA Applied Japanese Linguistics
- MA Japanese Literature
- MA Japanese Studies
- MA Comparative Literature (Africa/Asia)
- Degree Programmes with Language Options
Degree Course Options
- Advanced Practical Japanese
- Basic Japanese 1
- Basic Japanese 2
- Extended Essay (Japanese Language and Culture) 1
- Extended Essay (Japanese Language and Culture) 2
- Higher Intermediate Japanese
- Independent Study Project in Japanese Language and Culture
- Intermediate Japanese 1
- Intermediate Japanese 2
- Introduction to Pre-Modern Japanese Language
- Introduction to the Study of Language Learning 1
- Introduction to the Study of Language Learning 2
- J1: Accelerated Elementary Japanese
- J1: Elementary Japanese
- J2: Japanese
- The Structure of Japanese 1
- Advanced Practical Japanese (Masters)
- Basic Japanese 1 (Postgraduate)
- Basic Japanese 2 (Postgraduate)
- Intermediate Japanese 1 (Postgraduate)
- Intermediate Japanese 2 (Postgraduate)
- Intermediate Japanese 3 (Postgraduate)
- Japanese Language Learning and Teaching
- Practical Translation: English into Japanese
- Practical Translation: Japanese into English
- Second Language Acquisition in Japanese
- Syntactic Structure of Japanese 1
Language Centre
Other Resources
- Projects by Language Centre Students of Japanese
- Jinrikisha - How We Learnt Japanese
- Worksheets and Helpsheets
- Japanese Language Resources
- Japanese Language Proficiency Test
- Kanji Aptitude Test at SOAS Language Centre
- Japanese Speech Contest: Spoken Business Japanese
- Japanee Teaching Resources
Please Note: Not all courses and programmes are available every year
