Re: "Fluent in Japanese"

[rynling]

Another thing I love is when someone is applying for an extremely competative program that involves teaching English in East Asia (JET, for example) and their formal statement of purpose is filthy with grammatical errors. The assumption that people in Asia (not to mention the people reading the application!) are so stupid and ignorant that they won't notice is just so gratifying.

I'm venting about specific people who annoy me, because I'm bitter and petty like that, but I think what I'm actually upset about is the unfortunate fact that linguistic proficiency is not generally regarded as a "skill" in the same way that, say, mathematical proficiency is. It's like, listen. Just because I can catch a ball if someone throws it to me doesn't mean that I'm qualified to teach Physics, you know?

Comments

[rynling]

This is really interesting and relevant to me!!!!!!!!!

I apologize for all the exclamation marks, but I keep seeing English-language advertisements for academic positions in Germany, and I've been talking with a few academic friends in the UK about how they're planning to move to Germany. (Or feeling forced to leave the UK for various reasons, including possible medication shortages due to Brexit? I don't really understand the situation, tbh.) The topic that keeps coming up are the many, many postdocs, research fellowships, and teaching positions available at German universities. The salaries aren't competitive with American universities, but they're far above what someone just out of grad school in most other countries in the EU (and Israel+Northern Africa) could expect to make, and I've been wondering what's going on there since I went on the job market myself.

There's been a similar push to hire foreign professors and researchers in East Asia, but I think this trend probably has something to do with American universities setting up branch locations in Asian countries that send a lot of international students to the U.S. - in other words, it's about American capitalism, either taking advantage of it or resisting it. I doubt that's what's going on in Germany, but I really don't know.

I don't know a lot of things, honestly. Academia in the United States is about as insular as you might expect, and it's really depressing sometimes.

In any case, it's interesting to catch a glimpse of what that looks like from the German side, although "the chance that one of your mandatory courses this year happens to only be taught by someone who speaks approximately enough German to order coffee" doesn't sound like a happy, productive, or sustainable situation...

Sorry for going on about this, but I wanted to thank you for your comments. And for the iguana icon as well, because that is a very handsome creature!

[snake_socks]

Ok, let me know if I get too longwinded here, but the thing about entering uni in Germany is, there's like a 98% probability that you've spent a minimum of 4h/wk learning English, for at least 8-9 years at that point. So it's not really that much of a barrier. (sidebar, the whole 'deal with it' attitude is pretty characteristic of German higher education; it's dirt cheap, and that doesn't only come out of docents' pay, but (primarily) also out of the fact that unis are less like boarding schools and more like, well, educational buffets for unsupervised adults? More on that later, maybe)

Also, bit of a historical note, Bachelor degrees were only introduced widely like, 10-15 years ago, before that it was Master-equivalent or nothing, so there's still a fairly strong culture around only going the academic route if you're serious about, well, academia, and since (depending on the field) a good chunk of the good talks/workshops/conferences/summer schools/journals are in English anyways, might as well get used to it. (And if you're really serious and plan to *stay* in academia, shuffling around the rest of Europe is obviously also encouraged especially for grad students and post-docs)

Seriously, never be sorry for giving me an opening to yell about this stuff!

(fwiw, even if it doesn't always sound like it, I'm quite fond of German academia in many ways. Not for me as a career, but still)