27 December 2011

Saving Japanese at UC?

27 December 2011 | johnboy

An Andrew Seach has kicked off an e-petition to save the Japanese Language Program at the University of Canberra.

With many students in the middle of their degrees this cancellation would cause so much stress and many problems. Especially for the ones who decided to go to university to specifically learn the Japanese Language.

The Japanese Program has allowed many students to learn the language and culture, which is important in the current globalizing world and especially in our very multicultural Australia. It has helped create great friendships with many Japanese students on exchange at the university and also while benefiting local students, it is a very attractive course for international students.

The university has agreements with several universities in Japan and while we have students anticipating going on exchange in Japan, we also receive many Japanese students to learn English. This is a great way to represent our university and our country.

Please help us maintain this excellent, well developed language course with the best, most encouraging teachers by signing this partition.

One assumes they’ll be able to take Japanese courses at ANU?

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dungfungus7:56 pm 29 Dec 11

There must be reduced funding from Japan for Japanese language classes. This probably reflects the economic hard times in that country. For many years there has been a perception that learning Japanese, Mandarin and Indonesian was a must if one was to pursue a commercial career dealing with these countries. This is a myth – everyone doing serious international business these days does it in English. In fact, there are more English speaking people in China than any other country. The second most influential and widely spoken language is Spanish which will soon be the predominant language in North America. Would be a great idea for the ACT Government to severe the Nara, Japan sister city deal and replace it with say, Seville in Spain. I am sure Jon Stanhope got a lot of inspiration for his public art programme after trekking through Spain. Haven’t seen and Japanese inspired public art around Canberra incidentally.

NoImRight4:48 pm 29 Dec 11

Well if an on line petition wont save it nothing will!

Mr Waffle11:00 am 29 Dec 11

p1 said :

Well I imagine it is pretty had to convince Indian and Chinese students to study Japanese in Canberra.

Can’t speak for every year, but when I studied Japanese at uni, half the class was Chinese students. *shrug* Not sure if it was out of interest or ‘easy marks’ (local students often disparagingly say that Chinese students get it easy since they mostly already know the written language).

I think the difficulty faced by Japanese courses is that it’s a bugger of a language that takes a long time for English speakers to learn, so it’s hard to retain students over several years, compared to say a European language where you should become proficient a lot quicker. If you invest 2+ years of your life into the language and don’t feel like you’re getting anywhere then it can be pretty easy to give up hope. I’ve heard from a friend that the Japanese program at CIT suffers a similar student retention problem. Maybe the whole merger thing with CIT is responsible somehow…?

p18:32 pm 27 Dec 11

steveu said :

What a shame. I have a couple of friends who did this course and seemed like a great opportunity to study overseas. Not profitable enough I presume?

Well I imagine it is pretty had to convince Indian and Chinese students to study Japanese in Canberra.

steveu3:45 pm 27 Dec 11

What a shame. I have a couple of friends who did this course and seemed like a great opportunity to study overseas. Not profitable enough I presume?

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