On the podcast this week I talk with Paula Curtis. I learned about Paula through her writing over at What can I do with a B.A. in Japanese Studies? (aka 心配でしょう), which helped me find a Japan-adjacent job after grad school. We talked about language study, grad school, and how to “do” history:
- Thank you for getting Daniel a job!
- How did you start the website and what inspired it?
- What is a postdoctoral associate position and what is the work like?
- How did you learn Japanese and which textbooks did you use?
- What were the first major texts you read in Japanese?
- Sasamoto Shoji – Early modern historian addressing Sengoku Daimyo and Artisan history
- What is fluency, how do you make progress toward it?
- What older forms of Japanese have you studied?
- How did you decide to go into academia and how do you afford to pay for it?
- Does your research topic need to be fully formed when you apply to graduate school?
- What writing and study techniques have been valuable for you?
- Paula’s Oral History Project
- How did you develop your teaching skills?
- Are there any teaching/classroom approaches that have been particularly effective?
- What kind of funding opportunities are there for language study?
And at the top of the pod I talked about how I learned the phrase なんかの縁. I blogged about 縁 way back in 2008.