COURTESY OF CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY

Need-based scholarships are available to support students from the Chicago area interested in Japanese to participate in a two-week program at Mori no Ike, the Japanese Language Village, during the summer of 2014. These scholarships are made possible by a generous gift from the OMRON Corporation.

To be eligible, students must be between the ages of 8-18, reside within 50 miles of Chicago and demonstrate financial need. The deadline to apply for scholarships is Feb. 28, 2014. For more information, contact Concordia Language Villages at (800) 222-4750, visit the website ConcordiaLanguageVillages.org/scholarships or emailscholschp@cord.edu.

At Mori no Ike, participants learn Japanese in a traditional summer camp setting. Language instruction is tailored to learners of all ages and stages. Participants eat authentic Japanese cuisine and participate in cultural activities, such as the martial arts of aikido and kendo or creative activities such as origami (paper folding) or shodo (calligraphy).

Concordia Language Villages, a program of Concordia College, Moorhead, Minn., has been a leader in immersion language and culture education for more than 50 years and offers one-, two- and four-week residential immersion summer camps in Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Swedish, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Finnish, Norwegian, Russian, English and Portuguese. Sites are located throughout the north woods of Minnesota. Programs annually attract nearly 11,000 participants from all 50 states and many countries.