Saving Japanese at UC?

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.

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

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…?

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.

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?