 Okay so let me first wish you a very warm welcome to our session this morning and thank you for taking the time out and for calling in from all of those places you're calling in from. I think Mariko wins the prize for the person who's furthest away calling in from Hong Kong but from everybody else in Northampton and Bristol and Shropshire and Suffolk and various places. Thank you for being here. So my name is Alan Cummings. I'm the admissions tutor for the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures so I get to look at all of the undergraduate applications. I get to read the personal statements and so on. So what we're going to do today is so I'm going to talk you through the program, how it works, what sort of classes you'll be taking, what the whole thing looks like and then in the latter half we will have some time for questions and answers. I'd say like just in the if you have a question that comes to mind while I'm talking you can just put things into chat. So type your questions into chat and then I will at the end in the Q&A section I will go back through those and I will try to answer the questions. We also have Penny with us today so Penny studied Japanese at SOAS as an undergraduate student and she's not doing an MA with us so if you have kind of questions which are better answered by somebody who's actually been on the program rather than me who's one of the teachers on the program then you can also put in some questions there for Penny and we can both try to answer those towards the end. So that's what we'll do in the last half hour or so but until then I will kind of talk you through how the whole thing works. Okay so I guess one question you always have about universities is why should you go to a particular place? So we have some kind of really brief points about why SOAS would be a great place for you to come. First one of course is you know it's sort of in our name SOAS the School of Oriental and African Studies you know we are the the UK specialists in the study of Asia Africa and the Middle East so if that's you know subjects that you're interested in or places that you're interested in we're really the best place that you can come to to study that stuff. So we have over 300 academics who specialize in those and languages and the cultures of those particular regions. We have an amazing library and I guess maybe the library isn't the first thing you might think about when you're thinking about which university you want to go to but as you start getting deeper you know into your degree you'll find that the SOAS library is really an amazing resource. We are like a national research library because we have so many resources which are about you know the regions that we that we study. So you know if you're East Asia you can go up to the third floor the D floor in the library and you will find thousands and thousands of books in English and in you know Chinese Korean and Japanese about East Asia. So it's a really amazing resource you know as you come towards the end of degree and you're studying working on your dissertation for example you'll find that it's really invaluable. Students always enjoy our teaching we've got one of the highest satisfaction ratings of universities in London. We have a really nice staff studio ratio not ration I need to correct my PowerPoint obviously. So we have you know we have small good teaching critically on our language modules and the other thing I'd say about SOAS is that it's it's a really diverse and it's a really kind of international place you know we have around six thousand students and there are you know last time I looked about 160 nationalities being represented at SOAS the percentage of our student body who are from outside the UK it's one of the largest in the in the UK. So you know when you come to SOAS you're learning about the world but in a sense you're also meeting the world so you know you'll get to meet people from all sorts of all sorts of places when you come to SOAS. To kind of move on to give you a little bit of information about the department so the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures which is where you know we teach Chinese, Korean and Japanese. So we have several different undergraduate degrees about Japan, Korea and China. We also have a kind of a broader East Asia studies degree and I'll kind of talk in a bit more detail about those those degrees in in a little bit. We have within the department there is a dedicated team of academics who specialize in all sorts of different things so we have a specialist in language pedagogy, sociolinguistics, literature, modern literature, theater that would be me actually, history, film, media, classical language and so we also have of course dedicated team of language teachers. Our language teachers are all native speakers so our Chinese teachers and our Korean teachers and our Japanese teachers they're all they're all nationals they all grew up speaking those languages and they're they're kind of lovely they'll they'll they'll push you they'll they'll be strict when they need to be strict but they're you know they're really warm and friendly and they will help you get to where you want to get with with the languages. If you're interested in your researching East Asia, SAAS also has some of these these things I've listed below so there's a body called the Japan Research Center and these and there's also the SAAS China Institute and the Center of Korean Studies and these are like their little umbrella research groups so they bring together everybody at SAAS who works on those particular areas so you know if you're interested in Japan for example of course we have you know people in the East Asia department who focus on Japan but we also have people in the economics department and the social anthropology department in religions in art history so there's lots of people throughout SAAS who work on Japan but the Japan Research Center brings all of those people together and during the terms you know all of these research institutes will have weekly seminars where you you can get to hear you know our long lectures on specific topics by sometimes you know people who research those topics at SAAS but very often visiting scholars you know somebody's coming through the UK somebody's coming through London from the States or from Europe or from Japan we you know we grab them we bring them in and they you know they get to talk about the things they're researching at the moment so if you're kind of interested in finding out you know what the leading edge in research on East Asia is there are always lots of kind of great talks going on every week during term time that you can that you can attend so in terms of our our teaching in the in the department what our degree is basically aimed to do is is two things so we aim to teach you the language but we also aim to teach you about the culture so teaching about society the history the literary culture the film culture TV popular culture all of that stuff so we we aim to give you a broader understanding of East Asia in general but also you know the specific cultures of China or of Korea or of or of Japan we have some of our degrees have intensive language teachers on those degrees we we really aim to take you by the end of the degree you know you can start at a number of different levels I can talk a little bit more about that later but we aim to take you you know by the end of the degree to a level where you can you know you can read newspapers and you can you know you can begin to read novels you'll be able to kind of write reports in the language you'll be able to make presentations on on all kinds of topics we have lots of lots of small group teaching so the way that you know the language teaching works you know some classes you know some parts of a language module will be there'll be a lecture for example a grammar lecture and those may have everybody on the module attending just that lecture but then you'll also be divided up into smaller groups for you know writing practice and reading practice and for also listening and and speaking our lecture courses as well you know we have kind of big lectures that everybody will be in if you have that kind of image of university teaching but those are always accompanied by smaller seminar groups where you get to talk about issues that arose in the lecture or issues that arise out of a reading that we get you to do in smaller groups so that's that's the that's the way the teaching itself works to move on to the to the degrees then we have probably the easiest way to kind of think about degrees is that we have four-year degrees and the four-year degrees be a Chinese be a Japanese be a Korean all of those degrees are four years because they have one year that you spend studying at a university in Japan Korea or in China or Taiwan we also have a three-year degree and the three-year degree there is no year abroad with that one and the three-year degree is called be a East Asian studies so you can see from the title it's a bit broader than the others you can you can choose to study for example just one language throughout that or you could choose to study a different language every year if you want to do a little bit of Korean a little bit of Chinese a little bit of Japanese you can do that and you also get modules which are which are kind of a bit broader on that degree as well but both of those types of degrees so both the four-year degrees and the three-year degree they can be combined as a as a joint honors degree with other subjects that so us offers there's a list there development studies economics history history of art international relations law linguistics music politics social anthropology and and world philosophies so yeah you can you can choose to either do these degrees as a single subject degree or you can do them as a joint like a combined a combined degree so those those are the degrees that we that we offer the year abroad on the on the four-year degrees is is always an amazing experience as I say you get to spend one year living and studying in in the country we send you to a university there and you'll be taking of course classes you'll take language classes but you also have some other classes which can kind of vary a little bit from from university to university but you also have of course you know the the experience of you know living surviving you know 24 hours a day in the culture and using the language all the time so that's really the the the major benefit you're there you've got to be able to use the language you'll be exposed you know to vocabulary ways of saying things that you haven't come across you'll be engaging with people you'll be making friends all of that kind of experience and you know I always say at these at these kind of recruitment events you know for us who who work in the department that's so us it always feels a little bit like you know in your first couple of years when you're with us okay you know you're you're 18 you're 19 if you're coming from school so yeah I guess legally you're already an adult but you know you're just kind of making your first steps out into the world you're kind of figuring things out you know how do you do your own laundry how do you cook for yourself how do you you know how do you make for how do you make new friends all of that sort of stuff is is being to happen but when students go away on the year abroad it always feels like you kind of you go away not quite as a child but you're not quite an adult yet but when you come back it feels like you've definitely matured so those experiences that you have on the on the year abroad and there's all sorts of experiences you can have on those year abroad you know you can you can travel your universities of course have have holidays so people travel within the countries that they're studying in or sometimes you know Japan and Korea and China they're very very close to each other you can you can fly to China from Korea very easily you can you can hop on a ferry from Japan to Korea so you can explore kind of broader East Asia while you're while you're there as well you can get to visit the sites it's all Shanghai right well China but of course you also get the experience of of living there of of making friends relationships all of that all of that sort of stuff it really it improves your language improves your understanding but it also allows you to to grow as a as a as a human being okay so I'll also say something about the about the program structure and the kind of things you you study on each of our degrees first of all I'll talk about the about the four-year single subject degrees so be a Chinese be a Japanese and be a Korean and the structure for these degrees is is really quite is really quite similar so I can kind of I can talk about them in parallel here so in first year if you come in and you're on that degree you will have a language module I should say as well like you can see the credits here so each year at sauce you do 120 credits in first year you don't have any choice so we just tell you what it is you're you're going to be doing but if you're coming in as a beginner then your language module will be this 60 credit j100 ch100 or k100 and that is it's an 8r language module and you know the idea of that is to kind of it's to give you that foundation in in all of the key skills in language learning which are reading writing speaking listening and and translation so that's eight hours a week and it's you know it's divided up so you have you know grammar lectures but you also have smaller groups where you're working on reading writing or you're working on speaking and listening for example so that's that's an intensive you know eight hours a week is is quite a lot what I always say to students at these events is you know we always say you know it's so us that for you know the languages we teach you are are difficult you know they're they're they're not like European languages where there are lots of kind of broad similarities so particularly at the at the beginning you're always saying you're probably for every one are that you are in a language classroom you will probably need to do two hours or perhaps three hours at home by yourself so if you're kind of thinking okay or in the library you know eight hours a week then equates to if you're doing additional two hours that's 16 hours so that's 24 hours or it's 32 hours so that's that's the language module one question that always comes up is you know if you're coming in with a higher level of language then yeah we can we can accept you with a higher level of language we can give you a placement test and we can begin you on a higher level language module from year one there's higher level language modules though tend to be 30 credits rather than 60 credits so you will take something additional along alongside that so that language module is intensive it's there to kind of you know help you build that foundation in the first year alongside that then there are three other things that we we ask you to take so there's an academic skills module called Reading and Writing East Asian Studies and that one it's there to kind of to give you to teach you about the kind of academic skills that you need to do well at university so you know you're doing A levels at the moment or you're doing IBS maybe and on those you know kind of things at school you will have learned about writing writing essays but university level essays are are slightly different the way we need them presented so we tell you about how to use the library we tell you about how to reference you know how do you do how do you do a bibliography how do you cite your sources properly we also talk about what is evidence for an academic essay what does an argument look like what's good conclusion all those kind of really fundamental skills is what we it's what we deal with in that module then we have a module called East Asian Civilizations I teach on that module it's usually a team taught module so we'll have somebody covering China somebody covering Korea somebody me covering Japan and that module it's it's really to kind of you know a lot of you will come to so ask because you're interested I'm guessing in popular culture you know you've you're into kpop or you're into anime or you're into something in China maybe as well but you know you that module it's there to kind of it's there to kind of to give you a sense of that kind of broader history of East Asia both in you know the specific countries but also like the broader things which are shared across that that region of the world so there are several things that are shared you can think about the writing system you know Chinese characters for example you can maybe think about religions like Buddhism or you can think about like political philosophies like like Confucianism so we we aim to kind of teach you about that kind of that broader history so we go way back into prehistory and we kind of work up until probably about the 18th kind 19th century is about as far as we go in that module so we're giving you that kind of broad sweep of several thousand years worth of East Asian history to supplement the knowledge you already have about contemporary Korea or contemporary China that's a 30 credit module so it runs across two terms 15 credit modules are normally just one term and then we have a like a popular culture module we have a in this so you you kind of you'll you'll choose the one that fits the language you're studying so we have cool Japan we have k-culture by Korea obviously and then we have China in 10 words I should also say if you go onto the source website you can find lots more information about this structure and about the individual modules that you take in second year then again you can see it's a fairly similar structure so we have except you got a little bit more choice in the second year so you have your language module which follows on it's an intermediate language module so you begin to move away from kind of talking about you know those kind of basic things you do in year one which are kind of you know talking about your weekend asking directions you know that's kind of really kind of basic fundamental things as you move into the second year you begin to talk about more kind of abstract things you begin to acquire more of a kind of around around those kind of areas that then alongside that we have the society module so module on contemporary Japanese Korean or Chinese society that's a module that's there to prepare you for the year abroad which is in the third year on all of our degrees so it's there to kind of teach you what's going on politically what's going on socially water gender relations like all of those kind of big topics so kind of to give you an understanding of the contemporary society of the of the place you'll be living in the following year we have a history module this is a this is a new module which we started last year module called East Asian imperialisms and of course imperialism and colonialism these are kind of you know big topics at the moment the world begins to kind of think about and address those questions of what you know those those you know those empires on that kind of system of colonialism you know through the 18th and 19th century into the 20th century what that stuff meant for the world but on that module we we we try to think about imperialism in East Asian terms we very often think that imperialism is something that that Europe or the United States did to the rest of the world but in this module we we think about imperialism in the Asian context so what sort of relationships imperial relationships to China have with its neighbors what sort of relationships of course to Japan have with its neighbors particularly in the in the 20th century so kind of thinking about those you know those kind of discourses and those ideas that are very much feeding into the relationships between those countries in East Asia today still we also have a classical language module so there's introduction to pre-modern Japanese there's introduction to Hanja and there's classical and literary Chinese that's aiming to kind of give you a sense of the of the language before modernity so kind of taking you back into the past allowing you to begin to read texts which are you know which are before the 20th century so giving you a little bit of an introduction to that you know that much wider range of of history in the language can be a little bit can be a little bit different then we have a guided option so you'll choose just 15 credits from a list we have so there's modules on East Asian cinema there's a module on gender and East Asian literature there's one called myths legends and folk wise in East Asia and then we have a fieldwork module and you'll just choose one of those and then we have an open option module 30 credits and here you can choose a number of different things you can again choose from that list that I just gave you or you could choose to do a second language you know if you wanted to do some you're studying Japanese but you want to learn some Korean or you're doing Korean you want to learn some Chinese you could begin to study that second language there in the second year there's also what are called central options which are modules from other departments that size you know if you want to get a little bit of an introduction into international relations you can take like an intro module to that in that in that slot in year two year three is the is the year abroad I've already covered that you live I do study in the in the in the country when you come back in the final year the structure again you've got some some choices you've got some compulsory things but you also have some you also have some choices so we have there's an independent study project which is a dissertation so that's a 30 credit module where you work on some topic that you're interested in yourself and you'll be assigned a supervisor you'll work with that supervisor we also give you some trainings in that in term one then there's an advanced language module j 400 k 400 c h 400 again doing kind of more complex things with language we begin to talk about language in the final year as language use rather than language acquisition so you're using your language skills to make presentations or do research or write a report on some contemporary issue maybe you want to write about global warming maybe you want to write about populism maybe you want to write about you know relationships between states in East Asia and we we begin to give you the tools so that you can you can do that that kind of work so the kind of skills that you could use in in work as well you're making presentations and writing reports in the language that you've been studying we have a translation module there as well for each of the languages where you're kind of translating from Chinese Korean or Japanese into English we have a compulsory history module it's called history and memory in East Asia which is again kind of looking at the looking at particularly the 20th century history second world war pacific war Korean war looking at those at those those elements of history and how they have been remembered in in in each of the countries in slightly different ways you know sometimes you know really different ways and that's also kind of looking at how those events are represented in media so in film and tv shows but also kind of looking at memorialization you know sites for memory and those those kinds of things then again we have we have some guided option modules that you can you can choose from advanced language against classical stuff cinema literature there's a there's a list of those on the on the website though they they change a little bit from from year to year and then again you have the open option where you can choose to do again a second language if you want to continue doing a second language at a higher level you can you can do that or again you can choose additional east asia modules i'll just i'll skip quite briefly through this so if you if you want to do a joint degree the structure is slightly different and the way it normally works is that you take 60 credits on each side of your degree so 60 credits if you're doing your korean and then your politics for example 60 credits would be in korean and then the other 60 credits would be on the politics side and so in first year with us if you're coming in as a beginner then you would just take the language module and then the korean you know the politics side they would have also have a couple of compulsory modules that you would need to take you can find all of those on the on the website second year you take the language module you take the history module these are imperialisms one and you take the contemporary society module and then again 60 credits on the off from your second subject third year you're abroad as before um there all of the credits you study on the year abroad they will be on the language side of your uh degrees so if you're studying politics you wouldn't you wouldn't be studying any politics modules uh while you're while you're away obviously um then in the uh in the final year again the advanced language module history and memory east asia module and then you have the guided option module choices where you can choose again to do a second language there if you want to do that um or you can choose some of the other advanced modules that we have available um east asian studies if some of you are interested in in that degree um again i'll i'll skip through this one uh this one fairly quickly so you have a language module um actually in the first year of the east asian studies you have a choice you can choose to do either a 30 credit language module or a 60 credit language module uh we let you do that you know if you come in on that degree and you're not sure if maybe you want to transfer to be a korean at the end of the first year um then you know if you choose the 60 credit language module then you will have done the same amount you'll have done the same language module as those who are on ba korean uh because the normal 30 credit language module like you do is much less uh intensive um so um you would have three hours a week as opposed to eight hours a week so if you if you think you want to do a more intensive language module from year one then yeah you can you can choose that 60 credit language option just in year one uh on that degree um alongside that you have uh you have the uh the reading and writing the academic skills module you have the east asian civilizations the history module um then you have guided options where you choose either 15 or 45 credits from the popular culture modules and that's going to depend on whether you're taking 60 credit language module or the 30 credit language module um in year two again similar kind of pattern language module east asian imperialisms uh mis legends the focus of east asia we ask you to take that one um you take the contemporary society modules uh and then you have also an open option module uh choice there where there's a list of different things you could choose uh third year the dissertation language module history module and again some some guided and open option modules there um you can also of course choose via east asian studies as a joint degree in that case the the pattern looks something like this again first year you can choose either 30 or 60 credits of language if you choose the 30 then you will also do east asian civilizations second year again uh language modules one contemporary society module and the east asian imperialisms final year history and memory of the station cultures um language module and uh you also have an option there that you can choose uh as well so that's that's how that that's that's how the degrees uh work um people often ask us where do our students go to work after they graduate um and there isn't really an easy answer to that because people go on to do all sorts of different things uh you know some students you know they want to go and work uh in korea or china um and you know some students even come back from their year abroad with um with job offers um you know if you're at a university in china or japan or korea you can go and visit their careers office you can get to meet companies you can join job fairs and you can kind of you can join that kind of uh round of uh you know university interviews which are which are happening uh if you want to you know if that's something you want to pursue other people come back here and they decide you know i want to still be involved with east asia but i want to work in a company in europe uh or in the or in uk um these are some of the kind of destinations some of our students have gone on to uh recently far and commonwealth office uh nbc tv obviously in us uh nhk japanese tv uh deloitte uh bloomberg mufj which financial institution uh there's a whole range of things that that people can go on uh to do i should also say something briefly about the entry requirements um we really have um you know there's just a couple of different things that we that are that we look at when we look at your applications um one of them is definitely you know the the uh the grades you're getting so we look at your gcse results but in particular your offer will be based upon your a level uh results are you doing a level or i b uh so in terms of a levels it's kind of a bb or bbb level that we're that we're looking at or something equivalent to that um we say on the website that we we prefer you to have done a foreign language at gcse or a level uh if you haven't and you know we're very aware that lots of schools don't offer foreign languages at um at those levels anymore um so you know if you've studied a language in other contexts you know if it's not been at school what you've taken evening classes or you've taken a summer course or you've done an online course or you've been studying by yourself then tell us about that um in your personal state because we just want to know that you have an idea of what studying a language involves um because it's not you know it's it's quite a um you have to put effort uh into learning a language it's not like you can just sit in the classroom and somehow magically you will come out being able to speak chinese um you really have to you have to work hard at it and there are certain disciplines around language learning that if you've done a gcse or a level you already know but if you've studied by yourself you will also realize that as well so tell us about your language study experience if you haven't studied at gcse or a level uh it doesn't matter we're not going to disqualify you because of that but you know tell us about about your language study experience um we don't require you to have you know you can come to us as an abab nishio learner as a complete beginner um or you can also come in with a slightly higher level you know if you've been studying at a level uh or you've done you know some self study by yourself we can we can also take you we can begin you at a higher level language project from year one um generally we we get a lot of applications so we don't we don't interview very many people uh it'll but it will be maybe mature students or people with non-standard qualifications or heritage speakers uh sometimes we might interview you in those cases but in most cases now uh we're able to make a decision based upon the content of your application um when i look at applications really the most important thing for me is the is the personal statement um and there i really like to see um you know tell us something about your your language study experience but also tell us something about your your your passion your enthusiasm for wanting to study our languages and these cultures in an academic set so if you've read something um if you're out of book a couple of books then tell us about those if you've got some other experiences or other thoughts maybe you've got some ideas about what's going on politically on these days at the moment or there's some something that's kind of fascinated you about fan culture or whatever it is then you know tell us a little bit about about that so kind of you know bring your enthusiasm together with your academic interest uh in the uh in the area um if you do have kind of questions about the qualifications you need you can either contact me that's my email address there ac50 or you can contact the source admissions offers um as well uh okay so let me just kind of go back and kind of run through some of those questions that people have been uh have been putting uh in um so Ella you've asked uh are east asian civilizations and the pure limbs modules are those general modules or are they specialized for a certain country based on the degree you choose uh no so those are modules that uh so it's one module so everybody who you know whether you're studying china or korea or japan you will be on that module and the way the modules work for example in east asian civilizations we have some lectures which are you know broad so they'll be about um i don't know like uh buddhism in east asia uh but then we also have kind of specific ones specific lectures and seminars which are about your buddhism in korea or buddhism in japan um so we have kind of big themes but then we also have kind of specialist stuff as well um and east asian imperialism works in a similar way as well so you'll have kind of bigger ones but they also have uh lectures and seminars that are more specifically about what's going on in korea uh in a specific period or what's going on in japan a specific specific period uh as well um nicole you've asked about uh scholarships for international students uh the science website does have some information on scholarships uh there so there are you know there are some things that i think indian students can apply for um or students from uh from overseas um but there isn't anything that the department itself offers actually i'll put a link in chat here if you're interested in that but there's a a big list of the of the scholarships some of which are available just to undergraduate students and some of which are for your masters or phds but there's a big list of them all here at this uh at this link uh so you can you can take a look at those um samuel you have asked about uh jlpt um yeah i mean when i look at when i look at people's applications um you know i like to see that kind of enthusiasm and interest being demonstrated uh and you know if you sat jlpt or topic or one of those you know one of those kinds of um internationally recognized kind of language um tests um then certainly you can tell us what that because that's really good evidence that you are seriously interested in studying you know chinese or japanese or uh or or or korean um and you know depending on the level of course we can also then begin you at a slightly higher level from year one in your your language uh module um alicia you have asked about um whether it's useful to kind of to learn uh hiragana hiragana or katakana or hangul for korean um i'd say yeah um you know coming in already having you know the writing system or some of the writing system um in your mind uh actually would give you a really good start um so yeah if you can study a little bit of that before you can come um that would be that would be really uh that'll be really useful um penny do you maybe do you maybe want to say something uh about that did you come in uh knowing any any japanese uh or experienced other people in your in your group um so i had no contact with japanese really apart from just doing it in my free time on memorize it helps kind of if you have done like a gcsc in it because a few of my friends have done that and basically all that does is puts you in advanced japanese so you don't have to sit through all the boring stuff again and then in the second year we're all mixed together anyway so it doesn't really have much bearing on it but it does help excellent thank you um i guess this is alicia again so are there any particular qualities that you're looking for um in um in in students um i would say you know like when i when i come to look at those at those applications um it really is you know the the question of called you know there's a couple of things we want to know so we want to know is it is it possible yeah do you have some kind of background in language learning are you able to handle the demands of the of the language side of the course um and that you know really the best way to demonstrate that is through some sort of prior experience of studying a language it doesn't have to be the language you want to study if you studied french or german or spanish or whatever then tell us about that if you've grown up speaking two languages tell us about that you know if you've taken summer courses in something or you've been self-studying korean tell us about your experience of that um so that kind of the language side is one is one side the other side is i'd say you can you handle the academic demands of the of the non-language modules and for that it's really you know i want to know whether you're academically interested in studying the country um so there it's you know it's going to be exam qualifications or predicted results but also you can put something in your personal statement to demonstrate your your interest in that um and then i'd say enthusiasm or kind of passion like you're like i want to see that you're really interested in studying korean or you're really interested in studying china um and the reason why i i say that is you know with with one of these particularly the four-year language degrees uh the languages we teach at soas are you know they're not european language they're not european languages um so they're difficult um you know particularly if you're learning uh chinese or japanese uh the writing system you know chinese characters that there are no shortcuts to learning chinese characters it's just going to take you consistent study over over many years um and you've got to do it every day because basically you've got to rewire your brain to learn something which is which is quite difficult to learn um and you know the education systems in china and japan they also spend a lot of time teaching students characters so it's it's really it's it's a long process and it's a process you have to engage in really every day and particularly at the start um it can be difficult um like i i remember my own experience of studying i studied myself at soas more than 30 years ago um and you know i was somebody when i was uh when i was you know when i was doing you know gcse's and a levels um i was really really bad at art so i didn't really have a visual memory i wasn't very good at remembering kind of shapes and and forms um so um you know for me trying to learn how to write kanji trying to learn how to write chinese characters uh was was was very was very difficult to start you know i'd sit down and i'd write out a really simple character you know 50 60 times before i went to bed and i think okay i've got this one like it's in my brain i know how to do this i don't have to look at the example anymore i can just write it um and then you know sometimes i'd wake up the next morning and i could write it and that was great so it was in my brain um but then sometimes i would wake up and i couldn't like it just it hadn't it hadn't stuck um so i had to develop that kind of visual memory i had basically had to rewire my brain you know to to to remember you know those those chinese characters and some of them can be you know you can have 20 different elements 25 different elements in a single character so they're quite different different to you know alphabetical letters you probably remember learning the alphabet you know in one or two days at school and i guess you know some of you maybe got b's and d's mixed up for a few more days but it was really quite a simple process but learning chinese characters is is much more difficult so um when i say i want you to have kind of passion or enthusiasm or kind of show that to me um is really around that because when you're studying these difficult languages um it's always a kind of like an up and down process and some days it will feel easy um you'll be able to memorize vocabulary easy you'll be able to to remember to memorize chinese characters without very much difficulty you look at things you'll be able to read it and you'll feel great it will be very kind of affirming um but then you will also have other days where you know maybe because you're mood or maybe because of your health or maybe because of the weather or who knows something's going on in your life you'll have days where it just feels really really difficult um you can't remember your characters or libraries and sticking you feel like you can't speak in a conversation class um and it can be you know those days will feel depressing and dispiriting and you'll start asking yourself why am i doing this why am i doing this to myself it's so difficult i can't believe i chose to do this and at those moments you want to have an answer you know you want to have something in your heart that says to you okay i'm doing this because you know i want to you know i want to live in china i want to go off to japan there's this thing i want to do um so that that passion or enthusiasm that genuine interest uh is the thing that's going to kind of pull you through those um those moments i kind of feel like i'm persuading everybody not to study our languages not um but yeah so in terms of quality that those are the things i look for so you know can you handle the you know the academic side of it can you handle language side of it and do you have that you know that passionate that that kind of enthusiastic desire to to learn the language and to learn about the culture um that's going to kind of carry you through those um those those those moments um nicole you've put a question about um best languages for for for job hunting um i'd say you know if you're interested in in east asia uh you know we still have kind of a kind of a you know a situation where there are not that very many people in the world um who speak you know japanese chinese or or korean um so you know there are still kind of jobs which are open to people who who are able to speak those uh those languages um china of course is a is a much bigger uh job market than either korea or or japan uh but on the chinese side you do actually have a lot of people who live abroad you have kind of you know chinese people who have grown up in europe have grown up in the states have grown up in the uk um who speak fluent english but also speak fluent chinese um so yeah that there is there is it's quite difficult to say which of those is is best so i'd say you know don't just look at kind of opportunities because there are opportunities everywhere uh but look at what what interests you the most of where you could imagine living and uh and working um ali you've asked about uh i guess it's about the the year abroad so yeah on the year abroad the third year on ba japanese chinese and korean um you go to a university in japan uh we have 20 odd different partners there um so you can kind of choose where you would like to go um in china we have well we have a university in Beijing we have a university another partner in taiwan so you can choose whether to go to to mainland china or to go to taiwan uh in korea uh we also have uh at the moment six or seven um different um we have six or seven different um partners that we can we can send you to in korea uh so yeah so over on that year abroad you will continue learning uh japanese language or chinese language or korean language uh plus some other stuff you know something about society or politics or history those universities offer those kind of modules uh as well um so yeah you you you continue to study the language on the on the year abroad um elicia uh yeah we've got we've got some we've got some great modules on japanese literature if you're interested uh in that uh we have an amazing teacher called uh dr felipo servelli uh and he teaches contemporary japanese literature he's got a fourth year module where he teaches that he also teaches some other things uh as well um let's see jenny um yeah so the the year abroad on those degrees yeah if you're studying korean you have to go to korea if you're studying japanese you have to go to to japan um if you're interested though in maybe getting a little bit more language experience i would say universities have holidays um so predict the summer holiday uh you're going to have a couple of months there where you know if you're studying japanese at a japanese university over the summer holiday there's nothing to stop you going to korea and taking a short course in korean while you're living in Seoul or Busan or somewhere like that um you know you could go and live in Shanghai for you know a couple of weeks uh and take a course there so like formally the university we will send you to is in the country of the language that is in the title of your degree um but yeah if you want to go and take a short course in one of the university holidays in Shanghai or Beijing or Seoul then yeah knock yourself up we we think that's a we think that's a great idea um and actually by doing that you know if you've taken some beginners um korean um in your second year you could then maybe skip a level you know if you take like a short course in korean in the summer you could come back instead of going into korean two you could go into korean three uh so yeah if if you want to kind of gain experience with both languages that's definitely something like you can you can do and also of course if you're in japan there are korean language courses you can attend there um as well um uh Ella okay you've you've got a question about our partners in in korea uh we currently have uh let's see so we've got korea university we've got sogang university we've got yonsei uh hanyang uh sunkyung sunkyung kwang you can tell i don't speak korean um and sukmyung uh women's university um so those those are the partners that we currently have in korea we're we're looking to expand those maybe we'll we'll add a couple more but at the moment so it's one two three six isn't it six universities um and alisha yeah penny do you want to come in on that one okay i was typing my answer but i'll just say it so um when i graduated i felt pretty fluent like i can read newspapers i can read books i can talk to you i can ramble on and on but i would say it comes to like specialist topics like if you tell me to talk about this one specific thing that happened on this specific date and i don't have any background knowledge of it i'm gonna be a little bit confused and obviously there are some words which you never think that you would have to learn in another language and one day it just suddenly pops up and you have to grab your like dictionary on your phone and quickly type it in but uh so i would say you're pretty fluent but there's always opportunity to learn more right uh thank you thank you penny i mean you've got to you've got to understand of course that you know you're coming in penny started not knowing any japanese as as she said and so four years you will have been studying the language for for four years so your vocabulary is always going to be less compared to if you think about like a university student they will have been you know in japan hearing japanese for 20 years so you know compared you know we have four years so we can we can we can teach you a lot but you're never going to have we can get you to a level where you can function but vocabulary is something you're you're you pick you play catch up with we're just coming very very near the end of the session so i'll just answer um samuel's question really really quickly and then we have to stop but if you have additional questions you can send them to me uh ac50 at so i start uh ac.uk samuel we have about 20 odd partners in japan there's a big list of them on the website it's under the teaching and learning tab for for b.a japanese but we've got maybe six or seven partners in tokyo a couple in nagoya three in kyoto three in osaka a couple in kobe kyushu and also Hokkaido as well um so we have we have partners all over the place some of them only take two or three students um each year some take some take a little bit a little bit more but yeah there's a there's a competitive process to decide where you will where you will go in china we have uh in beijing we have bnu beijing normal university and in taiwan we have uh n ntnu so the national taiwan normal university are our partners um okay i think we have to wrap things up there um but thank you all for for attending thank you for all of the questions and all the enthusiasm and i hope that we see some applications um from you um and thank you to penny as well for uh for for for being here and giving the students perspective on on the degree as well uh thanks guys bye bye