Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!hp-ses!wunder
From: wunder@hp-ses.SDE.HP.COM (Walter Underwood)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: foreign language requirements for PhDs
Message-ID: <580005@hp-ses.SDE.HP.COM>
Date: 18 Mar 89 01:05:33 GMT
References: <134@cs.columbia.edu>
Organization: HP SW Engineering Systems - Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 30


   I presume, Henry, that you know how f^&*#%$ hard Japanese is to learn.
   Even people that you otherwise might think were pretty smart can
   take several years of *full-time* study to read Japanese at a level
   sufficient to read the simplest technical article, ...

Technical Japanese is much easier than conversational Japanese.
You don't need the honorifics for technical stuff. 

I'm taking a Japanese course right now.  The goal for the course is to
be able to read technical works and travel alone in Japan after 1.5
years of study.  It is 3 hrs/wk, and moving at about an undergraduate
college pace.  We are about 6 months into the course.

1.5 years continuous study equals about four semesters.  I studied
German through the fourth semester course in college, and this seems
to be pretty comparable in difficulty and progress.

"Japanese is difficult" is a myth.  Japanese is easy to pronounce, has
two irregular verbs, and a sanctioned vocabulary of about 2000 kanji.
You'll learn more than 2000 words to be fluent in almost any other
language.

One hint -- don't fool around with roomaji; start learning hiragana
(Japanese phonetic script) the first day.  Learning Japanese with 
roman letters is about as useful as learning English with hiragana.

Back to the subject -- yeah, require Japanese.

wunder