Comments on: Foreign nurses face the Kanji hurdle

By: Alice Sarmiento

Alice Sarmiento — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 21:38:49 +0000

Bilingual hospitals set up for elderly care specific to immigrant medical workers as employees?
has no one else had this thought?

By: karekora

karekora — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 11:43:47 +0000

whats wrong with adding hiragana/furigana? Is it a cost issue?

adding hiragana/furigana can eventually aid the learning of kanji, they will end up recognising and learning it, thus no longer needing the hiragana/furigana. kanji is a benefit to the japanese language, it can definately help you understand words you may not have already learnt. WIthout learning kanji, every word will look foreign.

As a Japanese learner, childrens books entirely in hiragana are hard to read. the kanji helps me read more fluently.

By: JapanSoc

JapanSoc — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:25:39 +0000

Are high Japanese language requirements necessary, or a form of discrimination?…

Foreign nurses working in Japan are struggling with kanji. All 103 foreign nurses who arrived in 2008 failed the first national examination in 2009, reportedly due mostly to kanji. The question of wh……

By: steven

steven — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:48:53 +0000

Even japanese native speakers fail the nurses test so why would a foreigner who also has to learn written, spoken and reading Japanese at the same time pass? Once they fail (as expected), they are replaced by another group who then perform the same menial hospital tasks while ‘studying’ on these training visas.

While there are ways around the problem, there remains the issue that many japanese do not really like dealing/working with non japanese in japan. Being such a strong mono-culture, there is always going to be the issue of foreigners not conforming to the japanese ways/expectations of doing things. Many japanese like it when foreigners can speak japanese at the ‘cute’ level but many more are literally lost for words when they have to deal with a fluent foreign speaker (unless of course that person happens to be on TV entertaining them!

By: purpel

purpel — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:14:50 +0000

Interesting topic, I thought in America we have difficult exames for nursing but it shows Japanees make things also difficult to forign nurses, they have to be happy that nurses go to japan and want to help . japanese language is not english language that everybody knows or can learn quickly .For short-term problem solving I would say they could use telephone translation what we use also in america for people who don`t speak english, instead of pushing nurses to learn Kanji while they are working.
And for long term problem solving as Mike mention that, They sould make nursing more interesting that more people could attend nursing school.It is always burden to nurses, they make things difficult and more stressful to nurses.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:09:25 +0000

Is it too cynical to suggest that the Japanese Nurses Association are more interested in protecting their own members’ interests than in solving the problem of nurse shortages? If nurses can’t come in from overseas then hospitals might have to pay more to recruit from the limited supply of Japanese nurses.

By: Emi Otsuji

Emi Otsuji — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 06:24:42 +0000

This reminds me of the NHK documentary I watched in Sep last year. It was about a philipinna eldercare worker who was made to believe that she couldnot function properly unless she knew enough kanjis… we need to break this mono-kanjual myth! It would be interesting to see what constitutes ‘langauge proficiency’ and ‘competecy’. I just read an interesting article by Kramsch and Whiteside 2008 on that. Did you read Language Ecology in Multilingual settings?

By: David Marjanović

David Marjanović — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:11:15 +0000

It’s of course cheap for me to say this (I’ve never even been to Japan), but, in the long run, I think kanji should be phased out altogether, as has already happened in both Koreas.