With the debatable exception of Waterloo for early career CS and a very small number of US university Japanese language programs using similar pedagogy I’ve never in my career had call to say “Ahh they are clearly using the superior technology they got at school.”https://twitter.com/AlecStapp/status/1036652879388585989 …
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Note this doesn’t mean human capital isn’t a thing... it’s just not really a thing from undergrad. (It’s not terribly difficult to pick up signal on “Has worked at Google/similar” from a discussion of e.g. scaling.)
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Curious about the Japanese pedagogy sidenote? How it is taught almost everywhere: memorize these word lists and associated symbols. How it is taught at schools which adopted Japanese: the Spoken Language (a textbook): “Drill the }^}*#*{* out of these conversations.”
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If universities were actually meaningfully in charge of human capital they’d definitely choose “drill the ^}*{%+{ out of it” and greater than 5% of undergrad majors in Japanese would achieve sufficient fluency to have a status meeting but they aren’t so they don’t and they don’t.
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Replying to @patio11
At my school we used Beginning Japanese, also by Eleanor Hartz Jorden. I think that the drilling approach was absolutely crucial and is a key reason I’m fluent. Just wrote about this earlier today on my Japanese Twitter, will post link to it here in a moment.
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Replying to @JapanIntercult @patio11
Drilling worked great. In our conversational class in 3rd year, our teacher used to make us turn all the casual stuff in the book into “polite” -ます and then keigo forms too. We hated it then, but that saved my ass in job interviews, taking calls at work, and so on.
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Replying to @camcavers @JapanIntercult
They started us with both of those on day one, on the theory that "You can learn to talk to your friends after you have friends, but let's learn the least socially fraught way to talk immediately." Absolutely the right decision.
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(Reinforced by "you lose half of your points for the day if you ever fail to address a teacher consistent with the norms of Japanese society when they're not explicitly roleplaying a peer; you should have *no* mistakes on this.")
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