Why Japanese?

My taking this course has, I feel, been somewhat of a long time coming. I began studying Chinese history many years ago, but have never had the opportunity, or desire (to be honest), to learn Japanese until I came to Columbia. While working for my MA degree, I realized, with startling clarity, how much information and knowledge I was missing by limiting myself to only one Asian language. Until then, I had thought that anything and everything I needed to know about my particular field of study (Bronze Age archaeology and history of China) could be found in Chinese sources, either in Classical Chinese or in Modern Chinese. I quickly realized how wrong I was and am now kind of scrambling to make up lost time and to get as proficient in Japanese (especially reading Japanese) as possible in order to be able to utilize the robust corpus of Japanese scholarship on early China that exists. So far however, Japanese has proven to be much more time-consuming than I had originally anticipated, but hopefully, with more work, it will get to be second nature.

Anyways, time fore more vocab review. こんばんわみなさん！じゃまたあした！