How's Mandarin or Japanese for an elective?

t9106

I'm a first year architecture student and was thinking about taking mandarin (LANG10020) or Japanese (LANG10210) as an elective. Just wanted to know what I'd be letting myself in for. Anyone know if there's a high failure rate or if it's difficult?

Maybe I'm naive but whatever elective I do I'd be aiming to get a 4.0 or 4.2 in it. Would mandarin or japanese be ones that this could easily happen in or would I be just making it harder for myself?

LifesaverNiall

I'd also like to know about japanese? I took it for the leaving cert so hoping to keep it up thanks

xxpopopxx

I'm also thinking of doing them , but I'm thinking of doing both. Would this a bit too much to handle , should I just pick one , but I'm really interested in both of them! :P

Conor108

I did Japanese L&C 1 last year. It was pretty good. The teacher was a native Japanese speaker and the classes were pretty small, around 10 of us, might vary though.

FAR easier to make friends in that small a group since you're interacting with each other rather than some ~100 person lecture.

Every week we'd do some more characters of one of the alphabets (Hiragana). Theres like 46 ish Hiragana characters you get to know by the end. Of the Katakana alphabet, we only needed to know our names. Then we did a few Kana characters, days of the week, months and just random words and the characters for 1-10, hundred, thousand, 10 thousand etc. We got little workbooks to practice writing the characters.

On the moodle onlne website theres little assignments like read the signs, describe the conversations. They were kinda fun.

We'd have little roleplay conversations with a partner from the class when we learned new words like talk about your family, buying things in a shop, give directions etc. And when the teacher did a roll call she'd ask like what are your hobbies/ how many in your family/ what course do you do/ where do you live.... little mini questions.

The aurals and oral are grand if you study and just listen to the conversations on moodle and know your vocab. I'd say the hardest bit is remembering the characters; I've forgotten loads of them. There was an excerpt all in Hiragana on our midterm, and questions in english we had to answer, that was pretty hard.

I got a B and kinda messed up my oral! Sooooo yeah it's a good module and I'm gonna register for 2 & 3 when it opens.:)

LifesaverNiall

so it sounds roughly the same as the leaving cert course maybe even easier? definitely gonna give it a try so!

t9106

would you say that if you honestly put in the work you're garunteed an A or can it be down to luck?

Conor108

t9106 wrote: »

would you say that if you honestly put in the work you're garunteed an A or can it be down to luck?

Maybe not guaranteed, but pretty close.

LifesaverNiall

wow, im looking forward to this now but.. is there help in registering electives and modules? Because im finding it totally confusing atm!

Conor108

LifesaverNiall wrote: »

wow, im looking forward to this now but.. is there help in registering electives and modules? Because im finding it totally confusing atm!

You can't register electives until 29th August. There's registration help videos on the UCD website somewhere

Killer Pigeon

Mandarin:

Morpork

I've studied both languages - Japanese for 4 years and Mandarin for 4 months. I gave up on Mandarin because the intonation differences were virtually impossible for me. If you mess it up, your words carry different meaning. God only knows what I was saying! Japanese is miles easier in this regard because it's almost completely flat. However, Mandarin beats out Japanese in terms of grammar. Japanese grammar can be somewhat confusing in some areas, but once it clicks the rest of the grammar becomes easier.

With writing systems, I think Japanese is easier. The Kana(symbols with phonetic sounds) alphabets make reading much easier because you can judge where the sentence breaks, and what's the focus etc. Also once you learn the Kana you can read Japanese completely without knowing any Kanji(symbols with meaning). All you need to do is find something with furigana! This is small Kana written on top of Kanji. A lot of kids books or manga comic books have furigana so you'll have plenty of options for study material too.

Listening should be easier too as Japanese is generally spoken slower and has far fewer differences in dialects. The standard is Tokyo dialect which you would study, but I lived in Osaka for 2 years and had no problems. All Japanese people will understand Tokyo dialect.

So anyway, if you're looking for an easier test, go with Japanese. It wins 2 out of 3.

P.S if anyone wants some advice on Japanese PM me or post here!

delta_bravo

LifesaverNiall wrote: »

so it sounds roughly the same as the leaving cert course maybe even easier? definitely gonna give it a try so!

If the course is Japanese ab initio at the Applied Languages Centre you cannot do it if you have done Japanese for the Leaving Cert. You would have to pick a more advanced course.

Conor108

Guys I registered for Japanese L&C 2 but I got an email today that the class is no longer being run on Mondays & Wednesdays and I'd have to pick the other offering. Grand so, I thought.

But now it seems that L&C 2 has just disappeared from registration. I can find 1, 3 and 4 but can't for the life of me find L&C 2. Does it show up in electives search for anyone else? I think I'll email them in the morning if it's still missing.

LifesaverNiall

im doing 3.. because appearantly thats the one you have to pick if youve done japanese for the leaving cert!

Conor108

LifesaverNiall wrote: »

im doing 3.. because appearantly thats the one you have to pick if youve done japanese for the leaving cert!

I'm doing that in semester 2 but I need to find & register for L&C 2 in semester 1 first

LifesaverNiall

i just logged on there and could find the number 2 one?

LifesaverNiall

LANG10200 - Japanese L & C 2(Level 1, Semester 1, Credits 5) Available:64 Relevant:1

LANG10200 - Japanese L & C 2(Level 1, Semester 2, Credits 5) Available:64 Relevant:1

Conor108

Damn, when I click on that it says "You have already registered for this module"

But on my main electives tab, there's "none found" under Semester 1 so I don't have an option to drop it. I'll email them tomorrow and sort it. Thanks for the help!

EDIT: Managed to drop it by fiddling around with URLs and the CRN numbers. Sorted now.

RayCarley

I did Japanese Level 1 last year, Conor108 gave a great overview of what that class is about. You can get a A if you make sure to learn all the vocab and all the characters (there's aren't too many overall you have to learn). It's a very enjoyable class as well.

Some of my friends who had done Level 1 then went on to do Level 2. One guy just found it way too hard and switched out while he could. Another guy persevered, yet they both said it was a massive step up. Like there's no more English or Romaji, so you have to know all the characters from day 1. So that's just a word of warning of how big a step up level 2 is from 1.