Shingo Satsutani is a Japan native who made a home for himself at College of DuPage, teaching Japanese to eager students and introducing a wide range of students to the beauty, history and culture of his country.
Satsutani enjoys introducing students to a new language and a new way of life. It also gives them an opportunity to learn a language more complicated than the Latin languages taught in most American high schools, he said.
The country's history also plays a role, not only in Satsutani's language classes but in his study abroad courses as well. Most students go into the trip with a pre-conceived notion of the experience, but those assumptions fall far short of reality, he said.
"Students really learn there's history there,' he said of Japan. "When I say old, they think a couple hundred years, because America is so young. But I mean old!"
Contact Satsutani at satsutan@cod.edu or (630) 942-2019.
Japanese is not out of the Latin languages, so you have to maneuver three different writing systems. Japanese has 100 characters, plus some imported from Chinese, but it's easier to learn Japanese if students have studied Spanish or German because of the phonetics.
- Shingo Satsutani, Professor, Languages
Areas of Expertise
- Japanese Culture
- Japanese and Chinese Language
- Immersive Education