Prospective Chinese, Korean, Japanese or East Asian Studies Students.

Hi everybody!

I'm a third year Chinese Studies with Japanese student, who just finished their year abroad. Recently the University had a few open days, I was there working the ones if July in any one attended.

Basically I've started this thread to give all prospective students for the School of East Asian Studies a chance to ask questions regarding their course, or just general stuff about the University/city of Sheffield and things like that.

Obviously, I won't be able to fully answer any answers about the other courses other than Chinese Studies, but I will be able to answer a little bit about them. Then I can get other students in that degree to come to this thread to answer your questions!

Also if any of you happen to attend any of the open days be sure to find our stall and ask students and teaching staff any questions.

So yeah, I look forward to answering your questions.

Ryan

:smile:

Reply 1

Iggy Azalea

Original post by UoS-SEAS-SAmb

Would you recommend learning Chinese or Japanese? I'm stuck between the two. I'm slightly more familiar with Japanese and I love it. But I also think Chinese seems a lot more useful and as I want to be a teacher, it would probably open up a lot more jobs having a Chinese degree (with a European language).

Also, how good is everyone's Chinese after the year abroad? I would like to take the subject but I often hear that people often never really reach proficiency at uni. Is this true?

University of Sheffield

Sheffield

Reply 2

UoS-SEAS-SAmb

To be honest I can't really offer you advice on which one to study, I personally love learning them both, so did both. Generally I would say just go with your passion, but if you are thinking in the long term and you think that Chinese would be better then maybe go for that. I think you should research that more, I'm sure Japanese still has many prospects for when you graduate too. Are you looking to teach Chinese, I have a class mate who said that Chinese PCGE's are not very common. But that is all I really know about that area.

I think everybody's Chinese level varies after the year abroad. Just like learning anything it depends how much work you put in to it. For example, I chose to go in a class higher than most other students, which was really tough to start with but I ended up getting a lot out of it. I would say my Chinese is pretty good right now, still room for improvement but I think with an extra two years then it can be pretty much fluent. Like I said it totally depends upon your own efforts, if you put yourself in many situations where you can only speak Chinese then you will obviously will improve, but if you slip into an expat environment where you only speak English then you won't improve as much.

I think it does depend on where you study too, for example, in Sheffield we go on our year abroad during the second year, where as other universities don't. When I was in China, I had a class mate from another University in England who was here as their 3rd year, by the end of the year, their Chinese was okay but they were pretty much the bottom of the class, they were in the lower advanced class. And other people from the same University actually finished the upper intermediate class (which is the lowest level Sheffield students must finish the year abroad on)

Hope this answers some of your questions, and If you think of anything else just leave another message.

Reply 3

Mae_be

I'm looking at Korean studies with Japanese at the moment and I was just wondering what level of fluency you get in Japanese by the end of this course?
Thanks :smile:

Prospective Chinese, Korean, Japanese or East Asian Studies Students.

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