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Pogopuschel (Offline)
JF Regular
 
Posts: 34
Join Date: Jul 2011
Location: Tokyo, Japan
08-06-2011, 11:37 PM

Basically it comes down to teaching English or going to grad school. Teaching English it not even considered a feasible long-term career by most people. Actually, you could teach English even without a degree in Japanese. You only need very basic Japanese skills (if any at all) to get English teaching jobs. Teaching experience would be much better in that case.

What kind of skills do you really get when studying Japanese at university? Great, you'll be able to speak Japanese but there are more than hundred million people in Japan who can do that as well, still much better than you. If you stick with your university Japanese program you won't even be fluent after your degree, most programs will put you on a level around JLPT N2. That's something you can easily achieve by yourself using self-study or by going and studying in Japan for less than a year.

Now you might argue that you can also speak fluent English which most Japanese can't. That's true, but 99.99% of jobs in Japan won't require native English, no advantage for you.

Personally I think a degree in Japanese (or any language for that matter) is more or less useless. Why pay tuition to learn something you can just as easily (and even faster) learn by yourself? Of course, you will need to have genuine interest in the language to success in self-study.

My suggestion: What do you want to work as? Just study what you're interested in and learn Japanese on the side. You can probably still take Japanese classes if you really want to.

Last edited by Pogopuschel : 08-06-2011 at 11:43 PM.
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