I'm planning on obtaining a PhD in philosophy in America (I just submitted my applications). Anyway, my girlfriend would like to return to Japan, and I'd like to go with her after I complete my degree. Obviously, this means I'll have to develop an academic command of Japanese if I'd like to work as a philosophy professor in Japan. Even if things don't work out between us, I would still like to reach such a level of proficiency for academic reasons. Two key things to consider is that philosophy is a field that requires a lot more reading and public speaking than a field like engineering, for example. Therefore, I will need a large vocabulary, a firm grasp of Japanese grammar, and the ability to reproduce both in speech and writing.

I just completed RTK, and I'm in the process of fleshing out a course of study. Vocabulary and grammar will be my primary focus, since I can practice speech with Japanese friends and writing through lang-8 or with friends as well. My main concern is finding a Japanese native interested in philosophy with whom I can improve both my ability to engage in philosophical dialogue and write philosophically in Japanese. I'm sure I can find someone at my university or through the internet, however. At any rate, here's what I have sketched thus far:

1. Tae Kim
2. Sorted Core 2000 (see here for details)
3. Kanzen Master 2級
4. Sorted Core 6000 (it's not sorted yet, but I'm assuming it will be once I'm at this stage)
5. Begin reading low-level philosophical material in Japanese + UBJG series
5. Kanzen Master 1級 + philosophical reading
6. Continue with philosophical reading while referencing grammar and vocabulary dictionaries

A few things to note: I'm including the Kanzen Master series since I'm assuming that JLPT 1級 certification will be an advantage, if not necessary, for employment. I opted for Core 2000/6000 over KO2001 since I want to quickly build up my vocabulary so I may jump into philosophical readings as soon as possible (plus, I want to try out the new sorted sentences). Lastly, I have about 4-6 years to reach the level of Japanese proficiency that I'm aiming for.

Please provide any comments or suggestions on my plan. Suggestions for good introductory philosophy texts in Japanese may be very helpful. Furthermore, if you're familiar with the academic environment in Japan, I'd appreciate any information. Most information I've found about academia in Japan has come from Debitou. If you know who he is, he is not someone whom I'd describe as impartial. At any rate, I know that some of you major or have majored in philosophy. So, post away!

vileru Wrote:Two key things to consider is that philosophy is a field that requires a lot more reading and public speaking than a field like engineering, for example. Therefore, I will need a large vocabulary, a firm grasp of Japanese grammar, and the ability to reproduce both in speech and writing.

I disagree with you here, one thing is for certain though, Philosophical reading involves much more complicated grammar. I believe technical vocab is just as complicated - each word in every field has its own set of holes and quirks. Technical grammar in science/engineering however, is relatively simple and concise compared to philosophical grammar. In English it is anyway. (And in the English translations/explanations I've read of a bunch of philosophers there were many comments on philosophers differing writing styles etc).

vileru Wrote:5. Begin reading low-level philosophical material in Japanese + UBJG series

I can't comment on the rest of the stuff since the other guys here know 10 billion times more about that stuff than I, so but by low-level philosophical material do you mean elementary textbooks on philosophy?
That sounds like a very good idea - reading books aimed towards youth to explain the basic concepts of philosophy

liosama Wrote:Philosophical reading involves much more complicated grammar. I believe technical vocab is just as complicated - each word in every field has its own set of holes and quirks. Technical grammar in science/engineering however, is relatively simple and concise compared to philosophical grammar. In English it is anyway.

This seems like an important point for me to investigate. Perhaps someone who has read philosophical material originally written in or translated into Japanese can comment on whether the grammar in philosophy is more complicated than other materials.

liosama Wrote:... by low-level philosophical material do you mean elementary textbooks on philosophy?
That sounds like a very good idea - reading books aimed towards youth to explain the basic concepts of philosophy

Do you mean a text aimed towards elementary school students? I've never seen such material for philosophy other than texts describing historical facts about philosophers, rather than actual philosophy, e.g. "Socrates questioned Athenians and was put to trial and executed." I'm thinking more along the lines of actual philosophical texts, such as the Platonic dialogues, which I remember being very easy to read when I first encountered them.

I should mention that I don't plan for philosophy to be my first choice of literature in Japanese. Most likely I'll begin with manga or children's stories, move onto to simple fiction, and then into philosophy.

Not trying to be an AJATTist. But like Khatz said, "planners" fail.

I think it's okay to make locally-developed decisions like "let's do Tae Kim!". But "After doing Tae Kim, I'll do Core 2k, then Core 6k, then KO2001, then...." won't get you very far.

Trust your future-self to take care of the future, what you need to worry about is the next action.

What kind of philosophy are you talking about? Eastern philosophy? Or are you going to be reading books in Japanese on Western philosophy? That makes a big difference in difficulty level.

(I didn't find the Platonic dialogues very easy; some of them aren't too bad but some of them are quite difficult. Of course not Aristotle level difficult...)

Squintox Wrote:But like Khatz said, "planners" fail.

This maxim is easy to believe if the first thing that comes to mind is that planners spend all of their time planning rather than doing, but that's not necessarily true if you think it through. Don't contributors to this forum stand in direct contradiction to this? There's several people who followed the path of Tae Kim -> KO2001 -> Kanzen Master series after finishing RTK. Did they fail?

Squintox Wrote:I think it's okay to make locally-developed decisions like "let's do Tae Kim!". But "After doing Tae Kim, I'll do Core 2k, then Core 6k, then KO2001, then...." won't get you very far.

If I already know what my goal is, then why would you recommend against making a plan to efficiently reach it?

Squintox Wrote:Trust your future-self to take care of the future, what you need to worry about is the next action.

Why, when it comes to language learning, should one only plan out the next action? It might very well be a good suggestion, but I'd like some reason to compel me to believe it.

Squintox Wrote:Not trying to be an AJATTist. But like Khatz said, "planners" fail.

If when you say fail, you mean fail to meet their goal but still continue that's true. If you're saying the OP will get no where by having a road map, I have to disagree.

Having a road map will only hinder your progress if you frequently refer to it, set unrealistic goals, try to plan things you have no control over, and don't adapt as necessary. Making a plan and following through won't cause failure. Unrealistic expectations and burn out will.

Make a plan, set a goal, and pace yourself, and you should be fine.

yudantaiteki Wrote:What kind of philosophy are you talking about? Eastern philosophy? Or are you going to be reading books in Japanese on Western philosophy? That makes a big difference in difficulty level.

(I didn't find the Platonic dialogues very easy; some of them aren't too bad but some of them are quite difficult. Of course not Aristotle level difficult...)

I'm interested in reading both, but I'd rather start with whichever is easier. I should note that I've read texts from most of the canonical Western philosophers, but my knowledge of Eastern philosophy is lacking.

Are you talking about the difficulty of Plato and Aristotle in English or Japanese? I agree that some of the Platonic dialogues are difficult (in English), but there's definitely a handful of easy ones that are good introductions (Euthyphro in particular). I'm not sure what Aristotle you've read, but I found Nichomachean Ethics an easy read (in English). I wonder what reading Hegel or Heidegger is like in Japanese...

IceCream Wrote:what area of philosophy are you doing your PHD in?

What do you mean? What I plan to write my dissertation on? If so, then it's far too early to say. However, I'm leaning towards history of philosophy for both career and educational reasons. A focus on the history of philosophy means you can teach a course on all the canonical philosophers, which means you can get a teaching position much more easily. I also have a bias to the history of philosophy since almost all the great philosophers have been written their key texts in response to that history. After reading Being and Time, which was strongly influenced by Ancient Greek thought concerning "being", I could no longer deny the importance of the history of philosophy. At any rate, my more contemporary interests lie in phenomenology (Heidegger), existentialism (Pascal, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Buber, Levinas, [NO SARTRE]), and postmodernism (Derrida, Rorty, Niklas Luhmann).

IceCream Wrote:But, core6k contains many business words that you just aren't going to need that much for philosophy.

Are the business terms worth learning, however? If they're words that I'll need to read a newspaper, then it'll be worth learning. But learning the word for something like "Game theory economics" might be less useful. I can just simply suspend those sort of cards though, right?

IceCream Wrote:Tae Kim's great for starters, but you can also get the dictionary of grammar series which will cover a lot, and go to http://www.geocities.jp/niwasaburoo/shuyoumokuji.html when you need a solid guide in japanese.

Would you recommend The Dictionary of Grammar series in lieu of Tae Kim or in addition to it?

The suggestion to further study kanji is warmly welcomed. It seemed like a no-brainer when I first read it. It might even be stupid not to study them more given how language is treated nowadays in philosophy.

vileru Wrote:Are you talking about the difficulty of Plato and Aristotle in English or Japanese? I agree that some of the Platonic dialogues are difficult (in English), but there's definitely a handful of easy ones that are good introductions (Euthyphro in particular).

I just meant in general; obviously if there's difficulty in English that difficulty will still probably be there in Japanese, in addition to the problems of the Japanese language.

Quote:I'm not sure what Aristotle you've read, but I found Nichomachean Ethics an easy read (in English).

I've recently finished reading all of Aristotle's non-spurious works; IMO the Poetics is the easiest, followed by the Politics and I suppose the Ethics (there are some easier works like History of Animals, but they tend not to be very relevant or interesting).

vileru Wrote:This maxim is easy to believe if the first thing that comes to mind is that planners spend all of their time planning rather than doing, but that's not necessarily true if you think it through. Don't contributors to this forum (...)

Eeek, please refrain from breaking down the post x_x

No, I don't mean people who spend all their time planning. It's people who make a plan, find it difficult to follow (usually because it's too long or not suitable to the situation), burnout and then beat themselves up for not following the plan.

Also, I haven't seen people who planned that from the start, have done those books in that order, in an efficient amount of time. Forgive me if there are people out there who've done it, I haven't been an active user the past 6 months. But either way, I'm sure these people are few and far between.

It's okay (in fact, a good thing) to have goals like "Start and do a lesson of Tae Kim a day", but not goals such as "Do Tae Kim, then Kanzen Master, then Core 2k...", because it... just doesn't work.

Of course, I'm not telling you to do as I say - you can go ahead with the plan. But I'm just telling you that from my experience, long term plans such as this don't work. But hey, I guess everyone has their learning styles.

kazelee Wrote:Make a plan, set a goal, and pace yourself, and you should be fine.

Plans that are too long, and that don't take into account changing circumstances (which over time, always do change) will fail. But I don't mean fail as in crash and burn, just that the person won't follow the plan, at least not in the way he planned.

Squintox Wrote:It's people who make a plan, find it difficult to follow (usually because it's too long or not suitable to the situation), burnout and then beat themselves up for not following the plan.

Ah, I must've given the impression that I'm a person that meticulously plans things out and becomes frustrated when things don't go according to plan. Let me emphasize that I'm not married to this plan. In fact, I'm expecting to change as it's simply a rough sketch of how I can go about reaching my goal. If something seems more fruitful later down the road, then of course I'll go in that direction.

Squintox Wrote:Plans that are too long, and that don't take into account changing circumstances (which over time, always do change) will fail. But I don't mean fail as in crash and burn, just that the person won't follow the plan, at least not in the way he planned.

Good point, but isn't this obvious? A blueprint never reflects the final building nor does a draft represent the finished manuscript. The whole point of making a plan is to establish concrete objectives so one doesn't merely grope down a blind alley.

Then I guess it's okay. Small, locally developed goals working towards an end goal such as native-level fluency are the way to go I think.

Good easy introductions to philosophy in Japanese might be encyclopedia entries about philosophers. I've read the entries for a couple philosophers (David Hume and Descartes) on the encyclopedia on my electric dictionary, and they were very easy but still introduced a few terms used in philosophy.

IceCream Wrote:None of the common terminology in philosophy is touched upon. So, if you go straight from core6k -> even basic philosophy texts, you're going to run into an awful lot of words you've never come across. If you wanted to be able to start reading basic philosophy books reasonably soon, creating your own coreXK of words accumulated from philosophy sources would probably be the quickest route.

The mountain of terms quickly dwindled when I first began studying philosophy in English, especially since some of them are repeated everywhere (subjective, objective, a priori, perception, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, etc.). Likewise, I quickly learned the terms that are unique to a specific author since they almost invariably repeated those terms throughout the body of their work. Assuming that you've read some philosophy in Japanese, is the situation similar or is it complicated by having to learn how to read and write new kanji or kanji compounds?

IceCream Wrote:In terms of teaching the history of philosophy, again, it's be helpful to find out a little more about how departments in japan are organised. For instance, i went to university in the UK, but the history of philosophy course spanned Descartes - Kant. There was a seperate course for Ancient Greek Philosophy, and a seperate course for continental philosophy, which seems to be what you're interested in...

I mean history of philosophy in the sense described here, that is understanding how philosophical ideas develop. How Heidegger interprets the development of "being" in philosophy is a key example.

On a side note: I know this is a controversial issue here, but is it worthwhile to go through Nukemarine's pre-made Tae Kim deck? My Japanese vocabulary is dismal (I'd guess ~100-200 words), so I figured it may be useful to SRS Tae Kim for the sake of basic vocabulary. Plus, it may be a good idea to burn Tae Kim into my head since a firm grasp of grammar is important for my goal. However, I'm not sure if it'll be worthwhile if an insignificant number of unique words are introduced (let's say, under 300 words). Can anyone comment on how many unique words are introduced in Tae Kim, and whether SRSing it was worthwhile or not for them?

I'm of the "Keep your decks to specific functions" mindset. Create a vocabulary deck of which Tae Kim and Kanzen Master will go into (on the deck I loaded, there are blocks to put definitions if needed). If you come across words you don't know, you can also activate those in your Vocabulary deck, where Core 2k, 6k and even dictionary entries w/ sample sentences can go (I also put Tanuki entries in there). Likewise, when you come across a new kanji, activate those (I use RTK 1, 3 and Katsuo's Kanken Kanji).

Consider this:
Core 2k (500 words)
Tae Kim Basic.
Core 2k (500 words)
Tae Kim Essential
Core 2k (500 words)
Tae Kim Special.
Core 2k (Finish)
Tae Kim Advanced.

Yeah, you don't have to break it up like this, but you might enjoy it especially as you get into the "Oh, I remember this grammar point" and the "Oh, I remember this word". They sort of compliment each other.

At that point, you may want to try subs2srs a very easy drama like "My Girl" or "Zettai Kareshi" or "Gokusen 3". The only reason I suggest this is personal experience that one or two hours of subs2srs mixed with constant listening to audio rips of the shows made the best listening aid I experienced.

I'll be honest, after I subs2srs my second show, I changed up how I approached vocabulary: instead of going systematically, I activated words that I came across elsewhere, which worked great. Now, this was before we had sorted sentences so going at vocabulary straight on could be useful here too.

So yeah, only early advice I can give is: Mix your Core 2k and Tae Kim together, Do two subs2srs shows. Since that accounts for 300 to 400 hours of effort, by that time you'll have shifted your game plan on later decisions.

PS: No need to do UBJG if you're doing Tae Kim, they're teaching essentially the same thing.

Nukemarine: You recommended beginning with 500 words from Core 2k before going into Tae Kim. What's your reasoning behind beginning with some vocab rather than basic grammar?

Is it too much of a hassle to keep my kanji cards on the RevTK website or should I import to anki?

Zettai Kareshi and Gokusen 3 are available pre-made, so I'll save myself some trouble and download those. Would you advise against this?

I appreciate the discussion.

You're right, switch the order putting grammar first. That makes much more sense. Just remember to read Tae Kim's site when you're doing the sentences.

You can import RTK into Anki. I put up a deck on Anki I think that's based off Katsuo's Kanken spreadsheet that can be used with your export data. The benefit of that deck is it has pronunciations and various english meanings that help remove vague keyword problems. Plus, RevTK only spaces out to 280 days (8 months) and is online, which are the two main reasons I switched over. After 3 years, I'm glad as my spacing is averaging over a year for all cards.

About subs2srs, that's where it comes down to personal preference which will change over time. Ice Cream does 30 to 50 cards per show, and goes through lots of shows. I tend to do an entire episode of just one drama. Others do something else. Still, if you don't have the show, don't bother doing subs2srs for it. If you don't like the show, definitely don't subs2srs it.

Well, the universal language of academics anywhere is English.
I'd be more concentrated on learning just 'regular' Japanese, and I think even the most business and political words are quite handy to have, not only to read newspapers. But also because philosophy isn't only about philosophical jargon, it's not a separate world. I'm guessing you're somewhere in your masters, so that's something you already know. Besides even those philosophical specific words probably use a lot of the kanji's and readings you can learn from non philosophical related material.
So I wouldn't discard anything as non necessary. I think every word you'll learn will be useful sooner or later. Maybe not in the sense of pure philosophy, but at least in the sense of being able to talk to your colleagues and students in case of teaching. When you continue concentrating on Western philosophy most important books and articles are written (or translated) to English anyway. At least on a high academic level.
I wouldn't even consider trying to read something like Heidegger in Japanese, would be more useful to be able to read it in it's native language German. I think you'd get more awe's, and be more useful to your Japanese university, if you're able to so.
But of course it's useful to get your vocab on a decent level, or just for kicks.
I think learning the Japanese will be quite easy, since you already tackled the part of learning the concepts content.

Well, if you go, keep us informed what's it like, and how you fare in Japan. Even though I switched my major from philosophy to a more exact science, so I could research instead of speculate. I'm still quite interested in philosophy where it touches upon my field of interest. And as such quite interested how the field of philosophy is handled in Japan. Maybe they do mostly use Japanese instead of English?
Since I did notice most of the foreign philosophers here in the Netherlands learn Dutch, whereas in the exact sciences hardly any foreigner bothers to learn dutch, though philosophers are more language savvy than scientists are.

Upon the matter of Tae Kim and the core sentences, and even sub2srs, most of it after the essential part, hardly ever comes up in the core sentences.
And I do think srs'ing those sentences it quite useful, maybe not for the most basic material, but as the grammar becomes harder it also becomes more rare in it's use, and I find it rather useful to have them popping up into my srs, so I don't forget.
I've been using sub2srs shows next to all other resources in my srs, and for those the harder grammar is quite useful. But for a long time I managed quite fine with just the basic and essential part, and some of 'all about the particles'. And when I've finished those, I'm sure there will be once again a long interval before I start studying more grammar.

Oh and the vocab in Tae Kim is quite redundant, there are about 600 kanji's introduced in total. So about 150 per part. Don't know about the amount of vocab used. But you can probably find out, by installing the Japanese extended plugin in Anki and have it analyse the Tae Kim deck.

Get to a Japanese level sufficient enough to read layman's books on the subject, then worry about learning academic 専門用語.