Started a BA in Japanese language and literature, and English linguistics and literature at Geneva University

September 2015

After spending one year in the army like most Swiss males over the age of 18, I went to University in Geneva to start a Bachelor of Arts. Geneva University is a bit special in the sense that if you choose to study humanities, you have to pick not one but two subjects.

Japanese culture, language, and literature was a no-brainer, but I had some problems choosing a second subject. I finally settled for English literature and linguistics, thinking that we would only have some English lectures and that I could focus on Japanese since I already knew how to speak English to some extent.

Oh boy was I wrong… the English department had nothing to do with learning how to speak English. We had literary history and linguistics lectures, in English. It’s as if I were studying in an English-speaking country. The goal there was not to learn the English language; it was to use it. English was just a tool through which we produced literary and linguistic analysis. This was a hard, but eye-opening experience.

The Japanese lectures, on the other hand, started from zero, and since I was very motivated from the beginning, I rapidly started making progress. Just like for the English department, the language wasn’t the focus of the lectures. We were taught about Japanese history, literature, culture, and the Japanese language was just a tool that we were being taught in order to be able to read sources in the text, and produce scholarly work in French. This is one of the reasons why there was little to no focus on conversation at that time. We were expected to read in Japanese, and write about it in French. Some students were expecting more and grew disappointed but this did not bother me, as I had other ways of practicing my writing through Lang-8 and conversation via Discord.

I learned the language through a mixture of University lectures and self-study, and I’m very glad I chose to study at the university. Had I expected to learn Japanese only through the lectures, I would have been very disappointed, but the University courses gave me a structure upon which I added a lot of self-practice. University also taught me how to write an academic essay; how to transform my thinking into coherent writing, as well as how to be critical in my thinking.

Looking back on it, going to Geneva University to learn Japanese was a wonderful experience. Lectures alone cannot teach you all there is to know about the language, but it is an amazing environment for one to grow in.