Post by Nalacakes on Sept 28, 2010 3:12:12 GMT -5
That's kind of a pet peeve of mine, actually. Though as Wyrd said, there are definitely cultural factors that you'll need to learn to learn the language, there's this odd misconception that you should be completely knowledgeable in all areas of Japanese culture if you know the language. And that, by extension, someone studying the language should be interested in anything and everything Japanese.
I remember last year some famous shamisen player came to our city to give a performance, and the Japanese department wrote and invited all students of Japanese to come along. I was interested anyway, and responded immediately, but a couple of days later a rather snippy second email came saying that they were waiting to hear from more students from the Japanese faculty, as apparently it was an event very relevant to our studies and more of us ought to be interested. I was amazed that they expected everyone studying Japanese would even be interested in what is, by Japanese standards, not exactly a mainstream cultural point to begin with. I wouldn't expect foreign students of Japanese to be passionate about shamisen music any more than I'd expect students who come to Scotland to study English to be passionate about the bagpipes.
Like I said, I wanted to go anyway, and appreciated the heads up about the event, but the second email rubbed me up the wrong way a little. You'd think that a department that has been teaching Japanese for years upon years would have sussed that students are interested in the language for wildly different reasons, and that not everyone is going to be interested in something just because it happens to be Japanese. :x
I remember last year some famous shamisen player came to our city to give a performance, and the Japanese department wrote and invited all students of Japanese to come along. I was interested anyway, and responded immediately, but a couple of days later a rather snippy second email came saying that they were waiting to hear from more students from the Japanese faculty, as apparently it was an event very relevant to our studies and more of us ought to be interested. I was amazed that they expected everyone studying Japanese would even be interested in what is, by Japanese standards, not exactly a mainstream cultural point to begin with. I wouldn't expect foreign students of Japanese to be passionate about shamisen music any more than I'd expect students who come to Scotland to study English to be passionate about the bagpipes.
Like I said, I wanted to go anyway, and appreciated the heads up about the event, but the second email rubbed me up the wrong way a little. You'd think that a department that has been teaching Japanese for years upon years would have sussed that students are interested in the language for wildly different reasons, and that not everyone is going to be interested in something just because it happens to be Japanese. :x
