Surprised (but shouldn’t be) to learn anime and pop is driving more young folks to study Japanese and Korean than, say, Russian or Italian. I like my hobbies but they didn’t much inform my choice of majors.
Evidence? Are you saying kids don’t like Turandot, Boccaccio, Akhmatova, Nu, Zayets and Visotsky but they all love Gangnam Style and “Aa! Megamisama”?
When I was studying Modern Japanese at university I was explicitly discouraged from watching any cartoons, as that would rot my brain.
I always liked 日本昔ばなし, though 
I don’t see why it would surprise you. “People are more interested in the cultures that interest them than the cultures that don’t interest them” is pretty straightforward.
Would you feel the same confusion if someone chose to study Russian because they liked reading Solzhenitsyn or French because they like watching Truffaut?
“Study” doesn’t necessarily mean “major in.” Lots of schools require or recommend that students learn a foreign language, but they leave it to the student to choose which foreign language. It’s not at all surprising to me that students’ choices would be influenced by the foreign pop culture they’d been exposed to.
Yeah, way back when, it was recommended you have at least two years of a foreign language to apply for college, and my high school had only French, so I took French. I didn’t give a flying fuck about French culture, so I hated it. (It was the late 80s/early 90s, so I really wanted Russian.)
Reminds me of how I looked forward to learning English when I entered German grammar school at 5th grade, because already then I was a rock and pop music fanatic, and most pop music was in English. English was one of my best subjects throughout the whole nine years of grammar school, and when it came to choose the two main subjects (Leistungskurse) for the last three years, I chose English and math (because I wanted to become an engineer, which I finally ended up to be). Through music and my love of the English language, I also became heavily interested and emerged in British and American literature and culture per se.
I’ve had a lot of (tech school) students take my Computer Graphics classes because they love playing video games.
And guess what? A number of them got internships and then full-time jobs at big computer games companies*.
… eta: Their first-year salaries often beat my teacher’s pay.
All because I told them my Big Vocational Guidance Question:
What is it that you do, when you should be doing something else?
Followed by: And can you find a way to do that for a living?
.
*My first two students both got great jobs at Raven Software (they were employees number 6 and 7, as I recall; now there are 350), and now work at Human Head, a spinoff. Raven does Call of Duty games, and was founded by two brothers who went through our Graphic Design program. [/proudsneakbrag]
It’s almost tautological that people like pop culture. But where is the evidence that Japan and Korea have eclipsed English, Chinese, Russian, Italian, and French?
ETA Also, @Thudlow_Boink has a good point when it comes to the influence on degree choice. Like particular cartoons and pop culture leading to French literature, Greek/Latin classics, Buddhist studies, other multi-year fields of study and even careers.
Indeed – @Dr_Paprika, do you have a cite or article about this? Is it “majoring in Japanese,” or is it “taking Japanese classes”?
If it’s not specific to college classes, one other factor may be that, thanks to online language courses like Duolingo, Babbel, Rosetta Stone, etc., learning another language (outside of taking classes in high school or college) is likely a lot more accessible to people than it used to be.
I don’t think that was the claim of the OP, just that more people study Japanese and Korean because they are interested in Japanese and Korean pop culture, which both definitely have a much bigger worldwide influence and impact than in my youth in the eighties. So according to your own assertion about the tautology of people liking pop culture, the OP sounds credible.
Yeah, that must be some variant of Gaudere’s law, writing about my love of the English language I make such a mistake… The bolded word I was looking for was immersed.
That is interesting, though it is not entirely clear from the article what exactly what degrees/courses are being pursued; literature or history or something else. Maybe the Italians and Russians need to crank out higher quality cartoons and pop music… Big-budget Hollywood Dylan Dog movie, or something?
What’s happening is that the influence of Asian culture on “Western” culture has been increasing for a long time. It’s not just Asian cartoons (both animated and non-animated) and pop music. It’s other things too, like other kinds of artistic fields. It’s science and technology too. It’s necessary for “Western” governments to understand the politics of Asian countries too. Because of this, learning Korean and Japanese and other Asian languages is more useful and, really, more necessary than it used to be. Furthermore, what’s going on is globalization, and it’s been increasing not just for decades but for centuries. The world is more connected that it used to be, and it’s presumably going to be increasingly connected as time goes on.
The article specifically says (emphasis mine):
So, it’s actual degrees/majors, not just “taking a course.” But, note how small that absolute number of Korean majors is (175) – growing, yes, but still very very small in the absolute. (It doesn’t give a number for people majoring in Japanese – I imagine that it’s larger than Korean, but probably still small in the absolute.)
Also, note that the “University Council of Modern Languages” is a United Kingdom organization, and the numbers they (and the article) cite are U.K. numbers (and the Guardian is a U.K. based paper); I would not be surprised if there are more people choosing to major in those languages in the U.S. and Canada, as well, but that’s not what’s in the article.
My son was a big fan of anime and manga, and that did drive his desire to learn Japanese. He considered majoring or minoring in Japanese, but went math/CS while taking Japanese classes every semester.
Just because you might want to learn a language does not mean it is offered, or one has to major in it. I am unsure of my university had a Japanese major back then, although it had a few courses. I was even in the “Japan Awareness Club”, which was more about food and movies. We had French and Spanish in most high schools; other languages were offered through ethnic groups or were just at a single school, and there were not too many of them.
Of course, interest drives learning.
I went to a Catholic high school in Wisconsin in 1979-83; we had three foreign-language choices (well, four, if you count the compulsory year of Latin):
- French
- German
- Spanish
One had to take a placement exam before your freshman year at this school. If you scored in the 50th percentile or higher in the English portion of the exam, you were given the choice of taking French or German – you had to take at least two years of that language, but could choose to take it for all four years; if you scored below that, you took one year of Spanish (with no option to take more of it).
I opted for French, as I (probably incorrectly) thought that German would be a more difficult language to learn. In retrospect, given that Spanish has become far more common in U.S. culture than it was in 1979, and would have actually had some applicability to my job, I wish I’d been able to take Spanish.
We had to take French from grade four for a minimum of six years. I took it for ten years then another three years in university. In Canada some jobs require bilingualism. I took informal Latin for a year (taught occasionally at lunch hours) and a couple years of Spanish. Other languages were not offered locally, it would have been nice to have more options.