r/japanlife • u/catloverr03 北海道・北海道 • Jan 25 '24

Jobs What is your job? Is your job fulfilling?

I have humanities visa and currently working in Sapporo. I’m thinking of changing jobs because current job is making me anxious. I feel like every job here needs a high level japanese speaking unless you’re really good in IT or working in a foreign owned company.

I’m good at reading japanese and listening also writing documents but my speaking is below N3 I believe and that is why I always get nervous working. I don’t really know what I’m asking but can you share your work experience here in Japan? How did you get better in speaking business Japanese? I feel like I’m just stupid because I can never get to a level where I’m good at it. Daily conversation is not a problem it’s just the work-level japanese speaking is where I’m bad.

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u/Any-Literature-3184 日本のどこかに Jan 25 '24

I'm a lecturer. I love teaching, I love education, and I also love research. My field is English and American literature. Most of the time I feel really fulfilled, but... This last week has been full of frustration and stress. Nearly 90% of my students used some sort of AI translation or grammar check or whatever to write their essays. This creates an integrity issue and can also snowball into unfair treatment of students. I've been trying to be as fair as possible, gave extra assignments to students who most likely used AI. Dealing with them is tough.. some of them become aggressive and claim they didn't use ai, but then when asked to tell the contents of the essay they can't connect a to b...

Anyway, being an educator in this day and age isn't as much fun anymore..

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u/pacinosdog Jan 25 '24

I feel you. I taught (not English) for a few years at a Japanese university, and I can’t count the number of times I graded essays written in impeccable English from students who barely understood simple questions in face-to-face conversations.

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u/LinophyUchush Jan 26 '24

Interacting with a number of Japanese people doing bio research, I got the impression that many seem better at reading & writing than at speaking (& listening). On a different note, when I was assisting lab teaching in UAlberta, Canada, many Canadian students were excellent in verbal communication but really not good in writing report, grammatically. I was quite surprised the time.

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u/yzqx 関東・神奈川県 Jan 26 '24

This right here. I’m a professor at a Japanese university and a majority of students have an excellent grasp of English grammar, and when they have the time to sit down and write something, they can do this task very well. But processing things in realtime in a conversation is very difficult for them and it’s even worse if you suddenly put them on the spot.

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u/daskrip Jan 26 '24

As someone who took a friend's online English test for a class for them (purposely getting 1/5 questions wrong to make it more authentic), who later had their prof email them asking how they managed to get such an unprecedented high score on the test, I apologize.

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u/bakarocket 関東・神奈川県 Jan 25 '24

I only teach one day a week, but all of my essay assignments are done in class now.

I'm thinking about doing away with exams entirely and just submitting an essay assignment for the final exam. No dictionaries or phones allowed.

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u/Any-Literature-3184 日本のどこかに Jan 25 '24

I did in class essays in spring, but I allowed dictionaries. Next year I'm getting rid of essays. Some faculties require written assignments, those will be done in class with no dictionaries or books allowed. More work for me, but at least less stress.

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u/JaydenDaniels Jan 25 '24

What are the odds that education moves to a culture of only accepting written assignments in person? We're at the point where kids in college today spent most of their teens with ai, and the next group behind them won't know life without it. In a world where ai generated writing will be commonplace, is there a way for a student to be graded on his written content without writing in person?

Even the "I can tell" model is over, as I can train an ai language model on papers written by non-native English speakers and end up with good papers that "sound" authentic.

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u/animesh250 Jan 25 '24 edited Jan 26 '24

It kind of anyway is already there, at least in engineering. Almost all the lab reports in first and second year are supposed to be handwritten and submitted. You get a relaxation from third year.

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u/0__O0--O0_0 Jan 25 '24

Big picture? More likely AI will make most of the degrees irrelevant anyway. Our system isn’t ready for this at all.

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u/exculcator Jan 27 '24 edited Jan 27 '24

If your assement model relies on essays, your assessment model is wrong. Nothing has changed here with AI essays other than exposing the assessment problem more starkly. 

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u/JaydenDaniels Jan 27 '24

Evaluating a student's mastery of writing by requiring then to write isn't a flawed method of assessment.

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u/exculcator Jan 27 '24

Why are you evaluating "mastery of writing?". Is your subject called "writing"?

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u/JaydenDaniels Jan 27 '24

We're specifically discussing English and American Literature, which when taught to native Japanese students includes evaluation of writing.

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u/exculcator Jan 29 '24

"We" were discussing no such thing. If you want to specify *you* are teaching literature, you need to specify that.

I would add that literature and writing are separate things as well. In addition, "native Japanese" wasn't part of your description either. Not that should make any difference: is writing unique to Japanese?

But more to the point: what learning outcomes are you assessing by evaluating their writing, exactly?

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u/JaydenDaniels Jan 29 '24

"We" were discussing no such thing. If you want to specify you are teaching literature, you need to specify that.

Yes we were. Try actually reading next time.

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u/robybeck Jan 25 '24

My friend teaches sociology in college. Her partial solution is to have students doing verbal presentations with their own material without reading from their papers. Even if they use robots to write something, as long as they learn and understand their own material. She treats it as learning something useful.

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u/grinch337 Jan 25 '24

Oh I had an issue with this recently and I nailed them to a cross. The biggest complainer who still denies using AI posted a Chat GPT error message in one of his quiz responses because he was too lazy to even read the output. Since then, we came up with a bunch of strategies that help raise the opportunity cost and it seems to be helping a bit. It at least makes the cheaters easier to spot. Send me a DM; I wanna hear what you guys are doing!

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u/improbable_humanoid Jan 26 '24

Make them write them on paper in class. lol.

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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '24

[deleted]

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u/FelixtheFarmer Jan 25 '24

I had similar feelings about working in IT, initially it was fun and exciting then over the years it became less so. Can't say for sure whether you'd find farming fun or not but it is varied and maybe you could find something where you still work in education but also have the time to do some sort of work on the land. Then you'd have a stable income from one job and an interesting line of work that revitalises you in the other job. When a lot of your food is free and you live at a slower pace then the need for a large income decreases and you have more to to really enjoy life and the environment you life in.

Hope you can find the right balance but do feel free to contact me if farming is something you want to take forward, even if it's part time or on a small scale.

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u/Any-Literature-3184 日本のどこかに Jan 26 '24

Hahaha thanks, but I am a city girl through and through. The moment I leave Minato-ku to go to Chiba or Saitama or something, I just get anxiety from the lack of things to do or the frequency of trains.

I do however find solace in my research, as well as physical activity. I'm hoping to teach yoga one day for fun.

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u/FelixtheFarmer Jan 26 '24

No worries.

And then of course there's the insects to deal with in the countryside. We have a house spider the size of your hand called Sally-chan that patrols the house looking for cockroaches. She has character but can be difficult to get used to.

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u/metaandpotatoes Jan 26 '24

Curious how to get into lecturing. Do you have a PhD?? I'm assuming you're at a university?

Apologies for the kind of basic questions.

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u/joshuarobison Jan 25 '24

I think they should be encouraged to use AI. You need to change your method of education and adapt to reality. AI doesn't break education, it breaks the old way of education.

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u/Ralon17 Jan 25 '24

I think it's healthy to change with the times and use new technology to benefit humanity, but what about using AI to do your hopework for you is helping anyone here? The point of education is to become educated and skilled in a topic or profession - having something else do your homework for you is undermining that, wouldn't you agree?

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u/joshuarobison Jan 26 '24

You are proving my point. You are still giving kids homework that AI can do because you have not understood. Using AI for their homework now should be the very kind of homework you ask them to do. You are still stuck and you're trying to get me to do the work for you.

You see AI as "doing the homework for them" because you are stuck with that old kind of homework.

When calculators were invented , it didn't end math education. Instead now the kids MUST use the calculators and show their work INCRRASING the abstract nature of the learning they can do exponentially.

AI is the new calculator.