A Japanese Canadian’s Linguistic Autobiography Eighteen years ago, I was born in Vancouver into a family with a completely Japanese background. My mother had moved from Japan only a year or so before my birth, while my father had been born and raised in Vancouver. Regardless of my father’s fluency and preference for English, my parents decided to raise me in a household filled with only Japanese until I was ready for preschool. For the first three years of my life, practically anything and everything that I could understand was in Japanese. My favourite TV shows, books, and even relatives were all those who spoke Japanese. In fact, I was apparently even a little intimidated by anybody speaking English. This made things a little difficult in Vancouver, where English was the national language, but I was able to manage fine until I reached preschool. According to my parents, learning English for me began as a struggle. It was difficult enough being in a foreign environment surrounded by a bunch of children, but being surrounded by a bunch of children I could not communicate verbally with proved to be a lot more difficult than my parents had hoped. Thankfully, I made a friend with simple gestures and body language, and eventually picked up on English quite quickly. …show more content…
Currently, my Japanese speaking is almost fluent. I continued to speak Japanese with my family, and have been fortunate enough to visit Japan on an annual basis. However, my Japanese writing appears to be at an elementary student level. In fact, my writing has not improved since I was a younger child, simply due to the dominance of English in my life and my lack of motivation to work on my Japanese writing. Recently, I have tried to change that and improve my written Japanese, but it is more difficult to memorize new characters than it had been years