 Hello everyone, let me welcome you to this the SAAS webinar. My name is Alan Cummings I'm the admissions tutor for our Japanese undergraduate degrees this year and this afternoon I'm going to give you a short talk to introduce our degrees and to give you a little bit of a sense of what studying Japanese at SAAS would be like. I'm sure that you know some of you may have some questions so if you have questions please just type them in the chat and I'll answer those then at the end. So I'll make sure to leave plenty of time to answer the questions. Thank you for thinking about studying Japanese at SAAS. Academics make pretty hopeless salespeople but part of my job here today is to try to convince you why you should choose SAAS over any of the other universities that teach Japanese in the UK. The first thing I'd say is that you know the East Asia Department we have a really amazing concentration of knowledge and expertise on the languages and cultures of Japan and Korea and China and Tibet and so as in general in other departments are also lots of people who focus on the on the research of Japan so people in linguistics and people in politics and people in art and music and economics and history and all these different departments there there's lots of people working on on Japan. So what this means is that at SAAS you've got loads of people who are working on the on the research into Japan. There's a great community of scholarship into Japan and that also means then that lots of latest research that people are doing will be will be fed into the kind of courses the modules that you can that you can take here. So by choosing SAAS you're really choosing to come to teach to be taught by people who are working at the forefront of their different disciplines and who are expanding our knowledge of Japan specifically and East Asia more generally. Another thing I'd point out is the amazing resource that is the SAAS library. Maybe that's not the first thing that you think of when you're thinking about where to go to do your degree but if you choose to study Japanese here as you kind of become more proficient in reading Japanese you suddenly discover that you have access to thousands of Japanese books and academic journals and newspapers. So it's definitely a resource that you come to appreciate more and more as you move through your degree. So the SAAS library is one of the best in the country probably even in Europe we put a vast range of work in English and Japanese and Korean all sorts of topics that you might be interested in addressing. The final thing I would say is of course that you're that SAAS you're going to be right in the in the centre of London and we're just behind the British Museum so your walking distance from all sorts of great attractions if you're interested in any aspect of Japanese culture if you're into the food if you're into music if you're into films there's just so much stuff that's always going on in London. So by choosing to come to SAAS then you also have access to all of that great stuff that's available in this in this city. You know I could I could keep on going for a very long time about what a wonderful place SAAS is. I should probably say at this point that I'm actually a SAAS graduate as well. I studied Japanese here a very long time ago last century I can say. So you know I myself have a very personal experience of what it means to study here and just how special this this university is. But I know that we only have have limited time here today so I should I should probably move on to talk a little bit about the the degree programs that we offer. I know from looking some of you will have looked at our website already but basically we offer two different types of degree at undergraduate level and these can be divided up into into three-year degrees and and four-year degrees. So for our four-year degrees in Japanese the main four-year degree we offer is BA Japanese and this includes a compulsory year abroad spent studying at a university in Japan and if you choose to do BA Japanese you can choose to do it either as a what we call a single subject degree where Japanese is all that you're studying or you can choose to do it as what SAAS calls a joint degree. So you can combine it with some of the other subjects that SAAS offers. So you could do a joint degree for example in BA Japanese and economics or BA Japanese and history or even BA Japanese and Korean studies. There's a big extensive list of all of the all of the different combinations that's available on our website if you look down the on the left hand side if you're on the the East Asia Department website and you go to degrees you'll see the BA Japanese and section and in there you can see all of the different subjects that you can combine it with. So Chinese studies and development studies, economics, English, history, history of art, international relations, Korean studies, linguistics, music, politics, social anthropology, study of religions, world philosophies, those are those are the available options at the moment. So as I say that that BA Japanese degree whether you take it as a single subject degree or whether you take it as a joint degree it takes four years to complete. The other main undergraduate degree that we offer is BA Japanese studies and that's a three-year degree in most cases. The only the only cases where it's not a three-year degree is if you take it as a joint degree with either Chinese or Korean in which case it'll take four years because you have a year abroad in either China or Korea on those combinations. So that's the main difference between those two different undergraduate degrees that we offer. So it's the question of whether you want a four-year degree or whether you want a three-year degree. There are other differences between them as well. The major difference I'd say is that the four-year degree because it has that year abroad one of the things we aim to do on that degree is to provide you with the highest level of competence in the language. So there's a greater focus on studying language on that degree and also the level you will reach at the end of those four years will be higher than the level you will reach if you're doing the three-year BA Japanese study degree. So that's the main difference. So BA Japanese the focus is more on language first, second and third year probably about half of what you do will be language. The other modules will be what we call discipline modules. So modules we are learning about Japanese history or Japanese society or literature and so on. On BA Japanese studies there's a lesser focus on language on that degree. So about a quarter of the courses you take will be language courses and the other courses you take will be discipline courses. I should say a little bit about the structure of the modules that you take. Each year that you're at SOAS you're required to take 120 credits each year and the way that that works there will be some modules which will be chosen for you. So compulsory modules. So for example if you're doing single subject BA Japanese in your first year the modules you have to take will be J1 Japanese and we have two different entry points for that particular module. There's an elementary module if a beginner or a near-beginner and there's an accelerated module if you have a little bit more experience of studying Japanese. This is the core language module that you take. So you're learning about how to write Japanese, how to read Japanese, how to speak and listen and how to translate as well. And that is worth 60 credits. On top of that from next year and this is a we're reforming our curriculum so it's a little bit different to what is on the website at the moment but alongside that you will also take a module called the introduction to the history of East Asia which sort of does what it says on the tin. So it's teaching you not just about Japan but also about the history of China and Korea so you can understand the historical and the contemporary relationships between those three countries in East Asia and the various factors that have sculpted that history. We also have two other compulsory modules in the first year. One of them is called Cool Japan which is looking at different aspects of how Japan is perceived in the world that kind of coolness that you associate with manga and anime and also with Japanese food culture and those kinds of elements. And then finally we'll have a new study skills module which will be aiming to kind of teach you about how do you do research, how do you use the library, how do you write essays, how do you prevent or how do you present an effective argument. So the kind of skills you'll be able to use in all the modules that you take during your time at SOAS. To give you kind of an idea of what the time you spend each week on those modules is like, not J1 Japanese course. As I say it aims to teach you basic speaking, listening, reading, writing and translation skills and on that module you spend around 10 hours per week studying in class. The other modules are generally three hours per week, either two or three hours per week. Two hours may be a lecture and then you may have like an R tutorial or it may be one R lecture and one R tutorial. You can see more details of this of these times and the kind of the assessments and so on. All of that detail is on the website. I need to give you a little bit of a warning here. When I say that you're on that language class, you spend 10 hours in class. What our language teachers say is that for every one R that you spend in class you need to spend at least two or three times that studying the language by yourself. So doing your homework, learning kanji which is something that can take a very long time at the beginning, learning vocab, doing little tests and memory exercises and so on. So it's a very considerable investment of time and effort. If you started studying Japanese by yourself you may already have a sense that Japanese is not an easy language to learn and to begin with you do really have to put in in the time. So that if you're taking B.A. Japanese you have to be aware that that first year course it is going to be a considerable amount of time that you will be working just language maybe 30, 40 hours a week where you're just working on polishing your language skills and trying to bring them up to a usable level. You know this on B.A. Japanese that language course is very very rigorous. For the four years that we have you in that degree we aim to kind of bring your reading and your writing and your speaking and your listening up to Japanese high school or even beginning kind of university level. So it is a considerable investment of time and commitment that you need to be aware of. On B.A. Japanese studies as I say the amount of time you spend in language classes is a bit less usually three or four hours per week. So the pace that you're going to be advancing at on B.A. Japanese studies is also going to be a little bit slower than it would be on B.A. Japanese. The way the program works for the rest of your degree you know as you kind of progress upwards through the second year and the third year of course is the year abroad on B.A. Japanese but as you progress upwards on B.A. Japanese the modules you take for example in your final year you will have more what we call language use modules where you're using the skills that you have already gained and you're starting to read for example literary texts in their original versions or maybe you're reading Japanese classical texts from from the past. You may be from the hand read or before or maybe you're reading Japanese academic texts about history or maybe you're reading newspaper. So we have lots of these kind of language use modules that where you get a chance to use the language skills that you have built up. There's a couple of things I want to say before I move to the Q&A section. The first is about the year abroad on B.A. Japanese. People are always a little bit worried maybe about the year abroad. The way it works is we have exchange agreements at the moment with 21 Japanese universities across the whole country. We have several partner universities in the big cities so in Tokyo and Osaka and Kyoto and Nagoya but also partners in Hokkaido and Kyushu and other places as well. The way that the year abroad works is that most of those partner universities they offer us maybe two or three places. So in your second year you take a placement test and based upon the results of that placement test then you make a first, second, third and fourth preference and depending on how you do it in that placement test then we rank you and that's how we decide how the placement works. Those universities, the programs they offer in Japan, they will generally be a combination of language so you're still working on your Japanese language of course but language and some other kinds of subjects as well but it really depends upon university, specific university what those what those modules are going to be. So there may be modules about Japanese history or Japanese society or Japanese culture, some aspect of that that you will be studying. On Bia Japanese that year abroad is compulsory, everybody has to do it so that is definitely worth thinking about when you're choosing which degree you wish to follow. We do have some scholarships, there's a limited number of scholarships available to students to help with the cost of the year abroad. For example there's a body called JASO which is funded by the Japanese government and they maybe provide 10 scholarships or something like that each year and this is money that then you can help you with the with the airfare and help you with your living costs when you're in Japan. As I say, this is an exchange program that SOS has with our partner universities in Japan and financially the way that it works is for that year abroad you just pay a fee to SOS, a very reduced fee, the current value of that is on the website but it's usually around 1300 or 1400 bonds something like that and that then is the only fee that you pay for the year abroad and that then covers all of your tuition in Japan. Obviously on top of that then you have to pay to get to Japan, you'd have to pay for accommodation, university dormitories and so on and you've always got to pay then for your food and whatever else you do in Japan. I should also say a couple of things maybe about employability. If you take a degree in Japanese or Japanese studies with this we're providing you with lots of transferable skills. There are lots of Japanese companies that are looking to employ foreign students who can understand Japanese or foreign graduates who can understand Japanese. You'll also have opportunities with Western companies that want to expand into Japan and recent graduates from our degrees have ended up working in lots of different areas so that people have gone into Japanese media. One graduate from a couple of years ago has started a fashion magazine in Japan recently which is being supported by Keio University. Some people have gone into game design and localization. There's people working for Sega for example. Other people have gone into different kinds of translation areas working for the Japanese government or working for the automobile industry. People have gone into telecoms or into marketing and research so there's a whole rich array of possible careers that you can possibly go into where Japan or Japanese is going to be very useful to you. Okay, let's see. I think I should maybe look at some of your questions here. The first question that I can see is a question from Guido who says, will there be information on the master's Japanese for those who wish to apply for the dual source and Sophia master's? Unfortunately not. This talk today is for the BA degrees but if you're going to the website there is some information about that master's program that we offer together with Sophia and the best thing to do would be to write to the convener for that program so if you write to Dr. Kirsch she should be able to help you with any questions.