Reply to What do you think about a Japanese Immersion Public Charter in Ward 7?

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Reply to "What do you think about a Japanese Immersion Public Charter in Ward 7?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Japan is actually 4th on the list of countries the US exports too - after Canada, China, and Mexico. While China appears to have better growth prospscts thatn Japan, one can never be sure of the future.   And of course Japan has an important culture, and in the period that its economy has slowed down, it has developed a vibrant and influential popular culture.

I don't know that makes Japanese immersion viable in DC, but I do think its a viable and important language.  [/quote]

This is where honestly your analysis of the utility and importance of Japanese is way off.  It's [b]not[/b] about whether we export a lot to a country.  Export patterns and product needs/trends change all the time and trend up and down.  That is not something to hinge longterm commitments like what language your child will learn on.  The reason Chinese is so much more likely to be relevant in the workplace for decades is 2 things: the amount of money the US owes China (in the billions at least), and the number of people in the world who speak [b]only[/b] Chinese.  The US is inextricably linked to China for a loooooong time.   These factors are not true for Japan.

You thinking it's viable and important is lovely.  It doesn't make it important enough to enough parents that they will send their kids to a school to learn it and commit their time and resources to it, no matter what ward it's in.  If the vast majority of those parents would jump ship the moment they got into a Spanish or Chinese bilingual school, and the Japanese school has no waiting list while the Spanish, Chinese and French schools have hundreds on their waiting lists, then Japanese isn't the right language.  [/quote]

actually our trade patterns have NOT varied that quickly, and I think the chinese debt panic is over wrought. It is in fact much easier for financial flows to change, and they establish less real human interaction than trade flows.    BTW, the US owes almost as much to Japan as to China http://www.factcheck.org/2013/11/who-holds-our-debt/

As for the numbers of people who speak only that language, thats not relevant if most of them are farmers, or even factory workers.   What matters is how many jobs you can get from knowing a language.   Thats why French is more important than Portugese - even if many francophones also speak an african language.

Now none of that means Japanese is viable for a charter school, and I already said that in my earlier post. There are lots of either ways to teach a language.

But the notion that Japanese is equivalent in importance to say Norwegian is not just exaggerated, but shows a complete misunderstanding. And the  paranoia about Chinese debt (which does NOT give the Chinese power over us) is something that needs to be responded to whenever it comes up. [/quote]

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