Photo by Ant Rozetsky on Unsplash
As the title suggests, my experience with languages has often been in waves. Perhaps to supplement this analogy further, a great example would be my experience with Japanese.
My household was filled with a variety of languages when I was younger: from Hokkien to English, Teochew to Mandarin. I was able to pick these languages up almost instantly with the intent to eavesdrop on adult conversations, or to even show that I was exceeding expectations as a child. However, my true interest lies with the Japanese language. It started from my experiences at sushi restaurants and watching child-friendly animations; I started self-learning this language with one of the language-learning compact discs you get from bookshops. While I managed to learn quite a bit of the language to make some sense of episodes of Doraemon without subtitles, the lack of usage among my family members hindered my ability to practise using the language daily. From my language environment, I picked up cuss words in Hokkien more quickly than the color names in Japanese.
My first wave of interest in Japanese waned when school started getting busy. Of course, the lack of interest in the language or even the culture within my social groups in school hindered this learning further. As such, I lost almost all my grammatical and vocabulary knowledge by the time I was 15, though I remember quite vividly that I still remembered the numbers 1-10 and rapped it before my oral examinations as warm-up.
My second wave was fleeting when I was 16-17, when Murakami started being a little bit more popular on Tumblr and other book-reading communities. Of course, while I was not up to reading an entire book in Japanese (note: I’m not even n5 certified), I went back to watching animation and realized I had lost any form of understanding. While I was not surprised, it was definitely a pity to my younger self. Nonetheless, relying on my latent memories, I was able to pick some of those back up, though this proved to be futile when the wave ended a few months later.
Me, in 2017, living my best self in Osaka.
The most recent wave started when I started taking up lessons again in university. Of course, I still succeeded (quite well) in reciting numbers, though it became difficult and somewhat nostalgic when I started on the vocabulary. My social groups were more inclined to engaging in the culture , which inspired me to also engage more in Japanese content, further supporting my learning of the language. I hope this current wave doesn’t crash anytime soon, as there is still much more to learn.
This post was written by Cameron, our #SGUnited Intern. Cameron is a 4th year Psychology student and speaks English, Mandarin, and Japanese.
At the Brain, Language, and Intersensory Perception Lab (BLIP), we investigate how learning particular languages might shape the way we experience our world. In Singapore, this is especially interesting since most of us grew up speaking or hearing more than one language. We thought it’d be fun and interesting to capture these memories of learning language!