Hi all,
I’m using the Bunpro JLPT N2 vocab deck to prep for the JLPT in December(!) and I got an…odd example sentence for the target word 濃い. I’m a new user and can’t add attachments but I took screenshots so I have the text verbatim as it has now been taken down:
ヒスパニック系の人たちは目鼻立ちが濃い。
“Hispanic people have strong facial features.”
I thought this was, at best, a weird over-generalization of the very diverse group that is Hispanic/Latino people, and I don’t think this kind of sentiment is pertinent to the study of Japanese as a foreign language. I reported it to the Bunpro team and they agreed with my rationale, took down the sentence, and replaced it with a new one (わたしは父に似て顔が濃いが、弟は母に似て顔が薄い)
Then yesterday I came upon the following sentence for the term 民族 (ethnic group):
民族は同族意識で結ばれているものですから、部外者に入り込む余地はありません。
“Ethnic groups are bound by a sense of kinship, so there is no room for outsiders to intrude.”
This gave me pause. I think this is quite a polarizing statement for a language-learning app. So I looked at some of the other example sentences for 民族 and found the following:
この民族とあの民族は、骨格や肌や目の色といった身体的特徴が全く異なる。
“This ethnic group and that ethnic group have completely different physical characteristics such as skeletal structure, skin, and eye color.”
“Completely different” skeletal structure variations between ethnic groups…I’m sure that doesn’t lead down a particularly sinister line of thought.
So now I start looking in earnest. Here are example sentences for the words 朝鮮 (Korea), 白人 (white person), and 人種 (race), respectively:
朝鮮に住んでいる朝鮮族はモンゴロイドに属しており、首が比較的細くて姿勢が正しく、また、脳が重い方であると言われています。
“Ethnic Koreans living in Korea are classified as part of the Mongoloid race and are said to have relatively slender necks, good posture, and heavier brains.”
インド人などはコーカソイドであるものの、皮膚の色は明色より濃いために白人とは呼ばれないとか。
“Though people from India are considered Caucasoid, they are not referred to as white because their skin color is darker than light shades.”
皮膚の色で人種を分けると大きく白人種・黄色人種・黒人種の三つに分けられます。
“When categorizing races based on skin color, they can be broadly divided into three groups: white, yellow, and black races.”
To put it bluntly, I think it is problematic for a language-learning app to sentences that are derived from and reflect the sentiments of debunked, pseudoscientific, and bigoted theories about race from the 1700s (although Carleton Coon tried to keep it going through the 1930s), and call it a study tool. I don’t think that the Bunpro team endorses this line of thinking, but I don’t know how to respond to the idea that this company is posted this kind of content uncritically and sharing it with users, when (on the other hand) words such as 精薄 include a context flag for being pejorative. And I don’t know if I can in good conscious continue to give my money to an app that keeps this type of sentences up once the issue has been raised.
To get on a slightly taller soapbox, I think this is concerning from an app of any variety, but in a broader scope, I think it is especially troubling from an app that teaches Japanese as a second language when xenophobia, ethno-nationalism, and negative attitudes towards foreigners (sorry, I mean ‘we the intruding 部外者’) are on the rise in Japan (and globally, of course). The recent immigration changes to Japan are not an isolated phenomenon; neither do these sentences exist in isolation. Maybe I am woker-than-thou by bringing this up on the forum of an app, but I don’t think this can be hand-waved away as “it’s just a sample sentence!” because it is clearly not just one sample sentence, and even if it were, the Bunpro team has acknowledged that there is content on the site that does not meet their internal standards; it seems clear that this is a content moderation issue for the platform rather than a few bad apples I found in <10 minutes of looking.
To put it another way: WaniKani has example sentences for 濃い, 民族, 白人, 人種 and none of them include the term Mongoloid.
