Help me find academic lectures in Japanese!

February 17, 2009 11:23 AM

Looking for academic lectures in Japanese freely available on the web

Just got back from Japan a few months ago and trying to keep my academic Japanese up to scratch has proved quite difficult. I'm looking for lectures (a la Stanford's Youtube lectures) that I can listen to in my spare time. Social sciences/ linguistics are best but I'll take anything I can get.

posted by kinakomochi to Writing & Language (3 answers total)

Best answer: Wow! An opportunity to answer a question honestly, and (sort of) self-link at the same time!

'Anything I can get'? Well OK ... this page of YouTube videos has a lot of stuff from the NHK Education channel. Most of the entries - the ones with the single head visible - are ten-minute 'lecture' presentations from 視点・論点 ('Shi-ten Ron-ten - 'Opinion:Commentary'), an 'anything goes' viewpoint program. The content of the presentations varies widely, although most of them deal with current affairs topics. New ones are added to this page five days a week (sometimes more often).

As a special 'bonus' just now - you will see that five of the presentations on that page are by foreigners living in Japan, working to 'preserve' some aspect of traditional Japanese culture.
posted by woodblock100 at 3:02 PM on February 17, 2009

Response by poster: Cool! This was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for! Thanks!
posted by kinakomochi at 11:05 AM on February 18, 2009

Ooh, I'm so glad you posted this question! I've been looking for things like this myself. This page of professors presenting to a lay audience is the only thing I've been able to find; I don't think it has any video, though, just transcripts.
posted by daelin at 2:30 PM on February 18, 2009