Hi everyone!  I am Visha.  I am going to be the Life & Style editor of this year’s Linguist.  I am currently in my second year pursuing a BA in English Language and Linguistics.  For this article, we were asked to write about a memorable language or cultural experience.  I want to take this time to talk about how I came to develop a love for language learning and how this pushed me to pursue linguistics at the University.

It was right after a few months of lockdown, back in 2020, a time when all of us were stuck in our homes and discovering how we could make better use of our time.  Some of us still had classes online, while others were stuck with a lot of time on their hands.  I found myself in the latter half.  It was during this time that I stumbled upon watching anime.  I didn’t become obsessed with watching them but it was my first time watching a show in an unfamiliar language: Japanese.  I became fascinated with understanding the language and this eventually turned into a hobby.  Even before this, learning a language has always felt very educational.  Though I was exposed to various languages at school, I could never absorb a language the way one should.  Studying Japanese at my own pace became quite exciting and I would end up spending multiple hours a day learning the language.

I started with Japanese but managed to pick up a few more languages like Korean and Chinese along the way.  I slowly realised how many similarities these East Asian languages had from certain words to grammatical patterns and even writing structures.  Yet upon hearing them, they sounded completely different.  They stood apart from English and other European languages largely because of the cultural differences between these countries.  Language embeds a lot of the culture from which it originates.  Due to this, when you learn a language, you tend to absorb so much more than you think. You eventually become curious about the country it originates from, its history and its culture.  Language learning is a skill. It requires time and patience and (as a reward) it can bring so much more to the table than you imagine.

These last few years have opened more doors than I ever thought possible and, studying multiple languages at once, is what led me to study linguistics.  Japanese will always be a memorable language for me because it made me fall in love with the process of learning a language and led me to where I am today.  It can be hard to say how it will define my future but for now, I am just grateful to have something that I am passionate about.  Language learning can be tedious but also very fulfilling.  I would encourage everyone to try their hand at language learning at least once.