Europe Japan Research Centre Podcasts

Why does anyone voluntarily want to learn a foreign language? Really, why on earth would someone in Oxford study Japanese? What is the whole point of this? Of course many answers are given to this question, but mostly these answers are either not very profound or they are somebody else’s opinion. Of the first type are answers like “I wanted to learn a language totally different from mine” or “I have always been fascinated by Japan”, and of the second type are answers such as “only learning another language makes you understand your own language” (Goethe’s opinion) or “so that I can inform others about my country and its culture (opinion of the Japanese Ministry of Education). While such type of discourse may be fine for small-talk in some quarters, we should avoid it in scholarly discourse on language education. Understanding the motive and the motivation for learning a foreign language is vital for designing language education programs and for un