When I was in Kindergarten, our school introduced after school classes in Japanese. This was pretty unusual for a government school in Australia at the time, where most of my classmates grew up monolingual – speaking only English at home and in school. I don’t remember much about the classes except for a small laminated card of the hiragana characters, and the orange striped cover of a square-paged exercise book. And origami. Lots of origami flowers. We moved house and changed schools not long afterwards, and I forgot that I had even taken those classes. But they must have made an impact on me… When it was time to choose my language major for High School, Japanese was top of my list, winning over French, German, Italian, Spanish and Auslan (Australian Sign Language). I continued studying Japanese for 6 years of high school, then three years of university, eventually living in Japan as an exchange student.
During that time I went through the radical transition from competent learner to fluent speaker, and felt my mind shift gears to accommodate new ways of perceiving, ways of thinking, ways of being in the world, and ways of being myself. That transition is the main reason I am a language scientist today. As a developmental psycholinguist I investigate how minds develop in the context of their languages, and the sensory worlds they bring. We should value every chance for a developing mind to wrap itself around the shapes and sounds of language.
I recently spotted the orange striped cover of one of those exercise books on a trip to my family home. Inside was a treasure trove of early word learning attempts. Fleeting chances for the seed of a word to take root. Living away from Japan for some time now, my Japanese is getting rusty. But occasional words still sprout unexpectedly in my English sentences – wildflowers bursting into the light … genki… pittari… tappuri… And I am still obsessed with origami.
This post was written by lab director Prof Suzy Styles who will probably never draw a horse more stylish than the one drawn by her 6-year-old self in Japanese class.