Japanese Professor

It’s been nearly 3 years since the last substantive update. Yet Google Analytics tells me that traffic has roughly tripled, and in the last year I’ve been starting to get quite a few emails from visitors. My apologies for disappearing so long, and many thanks to those who left kinds words via blog comments and email.

I will avoid the mistake I made in some previous posts about future plans by keeping this one short. I have started to do some cleanup, eliminating broken links and relegating the Kanji section to a subsection of the Lessons. New lessons are still mostly on hold until I decide exactly how I want to handle finishing the Beginning Lessons and revising the completed portion. In the meantime, o-tanoshimi ni!

I’m currently planning an overhaul of the site. I’ve learned a lot more about Japanese from a linguistic perspective in the several years since I wrote the bulk of the existing content. Now, I’m in a position to greatly improve what was effectively the prototype.

I’ve also changed my mind regarding the best way to organize both the existing and planned material. I think that the current “verbs late” organization of the Beginning Lessons makes sense for a classroom curriculum, but it makes it difficult to write about certain topics while maintaining a flexible ordering, which is ultimately what I’m striving for. For these reasons, I’ve decide to revise the existing Beginning Lessons before I add much of anything new.

In addition, I have a better sense now of what I can realistically do with the time I have for JapaneseProfessor.com. In particular, I plan to reduce the scope of the Kanji section, putting it on par with the Beginning Lessons and covering just the basics. Likewise, I don’t think I can pull off a comprehensive intermediate language course at this time. Instead, what I’m considering is to do a course in basic Japanese linguistics (with the amount of general linguistics TBD), and some selected topics in grammar and usage that draw on a linguistically-informed understanding of the Japanese language.

Before any of this, I need to do some general maintenance. During this time, you may notice some inconsistencies in formatting across pages; these will soon be ironed out. When I get to the revisions, I will try to go about them least disruptive way that I can, but in the meantime I ask that you forgive the unevenness between the old and new pages. Most of the individual page addresses and topics will be unchanged, but the conceptual ordering and the content will change somewhat.

I will continue to keep you updated as I go about all of these changes, which will be carried out graduate over the next few months. I will also mark recently revised pages as such in the contents pages. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if anything breaks in the process!

For any visitors who are wondering, I’ve been extremely busy with work and various other things for the last couple years and haven’t had time to work on this website, hence the lack of new material. Things are finally winding down along with the last year of college, so I should be able to resume progress soon.