Archive for year: 2015

Konnichiwa. Most people can give thanks to school for their literacy abilities. I am no different. However, a certain experience I had in school had a profound effect on the reader and writer I am today. It wasn’t a specific class, or even a particular book, that had this effect. It was learning to read and write in a different language that made me a better reader and writer in my own language.

It started when I had to make the decision of what language to choose when I was starting high school. Growing up in Southern California I was surrounded by Spanish and therefore, for some reason at the time, was not interested in learning it. I also had the options to learn French and Sign Language. However, I wasn’t interested in them either. Then came Japanese. I always wondered how the way they write could make any sense! I mean, it is completely different than how we write in English! Or so I thought. So that was it, I wanted to learn Japanese.

Of course at first the learning process was very difficult. Learning that Japanese had two different basic forms of writing, each with forty-six characters, and then a third writing style that was more complex than the two basic ones combined was a bit of a shock. Furthermore, learning how to actually write the characters correctly was a bit of a challenge. However, as we continued to do it, I go better at it. That’s when I started to realize all I was really doing was increasing my penmanship. The same thing I did in elementary school with English. For some reason, I started thinking about this whole learning process very differently. It started to make sense that learning Japanese wasn’t all that different than learning English. Sure, how we write is vastly different, but the concepts of learning how to read and write were exactly the same.

After getting the basics down we started to move onto more complex aspects of grammar and sentence structure. This was interesting because I never really liked grammar class for English and rarely thought about how it all fits together. It wasn’t until learning the grammar and sentence structure in Japanese that I really started looking at those same things in English. Since I learned how to speak, read, and write English as a child, everything just kind of fit together automatically. This however was not the case with Japaneses. It took some serious studying to become proficient in reading and writing in Japaneses. The outcome of this strangely made me understand my own language better than before. I was able to make more connections now about how words and sentence structure fit together and how changing these things can be read or interpreted in much better ways than before.

Being fortunate enough to travel to Japan a couple times also had an impact on me as a reader and writer. Maybe not specifically being able to read more words per minutes or write faster, but the fact that experiencing another culture made me reflect on my own culture and the culture behind reading and writing in the United States. I had never really thought that literacy in the United States had its own culture mainly because I never really saw a different one to compare it to. Suddenly, I had a greater appreciation for our writing style and all the famous authors in our history. Sure I had already heard of them and read some of their books, but now knowing how much of a classic those books really are, really opened my eyes.

While my writing did improve in high school and I was able to better interpret my readings as well, it wasn’t until I stopped taking Japanese and started college that the effects of studying Japanese for four years really came to light. My time thinking in Japanese and thinking about how words fit together and how to make better word choices all spilled over into how I read and write in English. I thought a lot more about what words I chose to use, the meaning and significance of them, and the impact they will have. I also was able to increase the complexity of of sentence structure as well as improve my grammar. And when I read I understood better as to why sentences were written the way they were and had more insight as to the specific words the writer chose to use. All in all, learning Japanese made me a better reader and writer in English and I am very grateful for it and the experiences I have gotten out of it.

Works Cited

Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” College Composition and Communication. 49.2 (1998): 165-185. Jstor. Web. 29 May 2015. (Available for download through Broome library database)

Murray, Donald M. “All Writing Is Autobiography.” College Composition and Communication. 42.1 (1991): 66-74. Jstor. Web. 29 May 2015. (Available for download through Broome library database)

Tillotson, Dianne. “The Concept of Literacy.” Web. 25 July 2015. <http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/literacy.htm>

Tully, Arvonn. “Where Might Literacy Be Going.” Web. 25 July 2015. <http://eserver.org/courses/fall96/76-100m/tully/>