'Japanese ideophones (mimetics)' are sound-symbolic words which encode sensory (auditory, visual, emotional, tactile) meanings. Auditory mimetics that imitate sounds are called 'onomatopoeias'. Some languages, including Japanese, have large inventories of such words. They offer vivid descriptions and help the reader/listener have a richer understanding of what is being described. Because their forms, such as reduplicates, are peculiar, students learning Japanese as a second language may get interested in them; yet students often report difficulty in learning and/or using them. One reason for this difficulty is the fact that mimetics are frequently introduced with their meanings, but without much attention to the role they play and the effects they create in their frequently appearing genres, such as TV commercials and recipes (Gyogi & Iwasaki, 2019).
This paper reports on plurilingual and pluricultural approaches to teaching mimetics in a Japanese language classroom at an English-medium instruction university in Japan. Fourteen higher-intermediate to advanced learners of Japanese with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds participated in this study. In this class, the students were given a task of preparing a recipe in Japanese to be handed in for a local international food event in which they would supposedly participate. They first compared recipes available on the web in Japanese, English and their familiar languages in terms of their content and structure. Next, they analysed Japanese recipes to understand how mimetics are used as well as the effect they create. The students then discussed whether and how words like mimetics are used in recipes in different languages and considered how to translate mimetics in Japanese recipes into their familiar languages. After that, each student individually looked for a recipe they wanted to present at a local international food event in his/her familiar language (other than Japanese) and created a recipe handout in Japanese.
We analysed the students' handouts, recordings of the class discussions, commentaries and their responses to the post-session questionnaire. Students' commentaries showed their increasing awareness of the differences and similarities between languages as well as the effects of Japanese mimetics in recipes. For example, the majority of the students used mimetics, especially in the title of their recipe, in order to 'make audience imagine the texture and appearance of the food' (Kelly) or 'make the food taste good' (Vivian). Furthermore, the plurilingual and pluricultural approach is also effective in bringing students' linguistic and cultural resources to the foreground, which would otherwise remain invisible. Through analysing the use of mimetics in different languages, students could expand their knowledge of different languages as a means of enriching their learning and expanding their perspectives. While the results of this study demonstrate students' heightened awareness of the effects of mimetics, further studies would be needed to facilitate and/or encourage students' use of mimetics in different contexts. Some plurilingual-pluricultural strategies to do so are suggested.
Gyogi, E., & Iwasaki, N. (2019). Genre-based teaching of mimetics in the beginner-level classroom: Translating TV commercials. Journal of Japanese Language Teaching, 174, 71-85.
