Japanese language pulling students away from Europe at Illinois College

Students are seeing major changes to the language departments at Illinois College.

The school approved a Japanese floor on the third floor of Lincoln Hall due to healthy growth in the minor and a rise in student interest. After several years experiencing extremely low upperclassmen enrollment, the French major is however being eliminated.

The changes are part of a balancing act to accomodate rising interest in Japanese and still meet the needs of those who want to pursue French.

With Japan a major economic power in the world, the Japanese minor has seen a growth in student interest, said Jim Marshall, associate dean of the college.

“We’re dearly hoping for a major,” said Japanese instructor Mioko Webster. The school is seeking to add a new tenure-track professor to the Japanese program to offer more upper-level classes.

The Japanese floor follows after the Spanish and German houses on campus. The language houses are designed for students to have intensive experience learning a language and culture, and to provide programming and opportunities for the rest of the campus to learn about those cultures.

Students are supposed to speak Japanese on the floor, although there are varying levels of Japanese skills among the residents. The students asked for a Japanese house in the spring of 2009.

About 30 students are enrolled in the four offered Japanese courses, which range from beginner, intermediate, advanced and independent.

Differences between the Chinese and Japanese Language

It might seem to the casual observer that the Japanese language is closely associated with Chinese, however nothing could be further from the truth.

Admittedly, Japanese looks for all the world similar to Chinese in print form and indeed has absorbed a number of Chinese words over the centuaries, in common with many other langauges which ‘borrow’ from each other over time. In the context of Japanese however, these ‘loan’ words are merely a sign of cultural contact. In actual fact it would be hard to find two languages which are more dissimilar.

Chinese was originally monosyllabic, (now largely disyllabic), tonal, isolating with a subject-verb-object order. Japanese on the other hand is polysyllabic, atonal, with quite complex word formation and a subject-object-verb order.

It was precisely this enormous gap between the two languages that caused so many problems when the Japanese tried to adapt the Chinese script to their own ends in the 8th and 9th centuries.