COMMENT ⊗   VALID 00002 PAGES
C REC  PAGE   DESCRIPTION
C00001 00001
C00002 00002	Pages 53-59
C00008 ENDMK
C⊗;
Pages 53-59
June 22

Useful thought for today. The number of Americans scientists who can
function in Japanese should not ever match the percent of the number of
Japanese scientists who function in English, because English is the 
international language of science, business and tourism. The goals of Esperanto
have been realized, but the language isn't esperanto but English.

Nevertheless, the number of American computer scientists who know Japanes is
too small; it may even be zero. This can be remidied as follows:

With foundation support (NSF, U.S. firms operating in Japan, Japanaese 
government) Stanford starts a program as follows:

(1) Entrants to the program are Ph.D. candidates in CS or EE.

(2) The first summer they take the intensive course in Japanese. They are paid
at research assistant rate for the summer, but this is their obligation. 

(3) During the next academic year, they take one ordinary course in Japanese
in addition to their usual activities. An extra stipend might help preserve 
motivation.

(4) During the second summer they take an intensive course in scientific
japanese with emphasis on the ability to read reports and talk about computer
science with Japanese computer scientists.

(5) During the second academic year they take a reading course of a part-time
paid job that involves translating a Japanese report or article.

(6) During the third summer they work at ICOT or a Japanese university or 
company in a Japanese language scientific environment. Companies like IBM
Japan would be ok provided the ordinary scientific conversational 
environment is Japanese. 

Remarks:

It may be necessary to start very small. The extreme is one student. In 
this case, the second summer would involve tutoring rather than a class,
and this might still be true for up to three students. Nevertheless, the
tutors should be paid and have a definite objective. The best situation
involves a professor whose speciality is scientific Japanese for Americans, 
just as there are a few professors whose specialty is scientific Russian or
German. If there isn't such a person to be found, and an advertized search
might find one, the program could make do with a combination of unspecialized 
teachers of Japanese (Mr. (Tanaka?) at Stanford is quite good, visiting
Japanese scientists or their wives and some American cmputer scientist
adviser with an interest in Japan.

Of course, it is possible to make a program not limited to computer science,
but it should be extended only to such other fields in which there would be
a real interest in having an American work in a Japanese institution as a
scientist.

The object of the program is not to prepare American specialists in Japanese
science. Such people would warrant full time programs. Such a program would
inevitably mostly attract people of limited scient6ific ambitions. Instead,
some small fraction of the future scientific leaders of computer science should
know spoken and written scientific Japanese, just as some know Russian or 
German or French. I cite myself as an example who can lecture in Russian
on the basis of self-study, visits to Russia, one course taken as an 
undergraduate, and one summer job spent translating an article. My subsequent 
effort at Japanese, undertaken at a later age and with less energy have been 
much less successful.
-------