Liam Aitken (2022)

Recent Daramalan graduate, Liam Aitken, only started his studies of Japanese language in Year 9, however it didn’t stop him from going to the ANU and pursuing his career in Languages. 

I attended Daramalan’s Japanese course from Year 9 to Year 12. Via a pure coincidence I managed to get into the Japanese course halfway through Year 9 despite not doing Japanese in Year 7 or 8. I actually did German in those years.  

In Year 9, at the end of Term 2, I managed to get Burridge Sensei as a substitute teacher by pure chance, and I had a friend in the same class that did Japanese who wanted to show Sensei Burridge that I had been learning. She was impressed by my enthusiasm to learn Japanese in my own time, so she encouraged me to join the Japanese class with no prior knowledge except what I had managed to teach myself with YouTube and Duolingo. You can start a language at any time. I started doing Japanese in Year 9 for fun and ended up going to the ANU to study for a degree in it. I also managed to get a job where I (attempt to) only speak in Japanese.  

I think it’s very important for anyone to learn a second language. In the process of learning the second language you get a better understanding of your own language. You tend to forget the basics of a language when you are a native speaker of it. So don’t be apprehensive to try and learn. You might love it.  

Oh, and one more thing, listen to Burridge Sensei or whatever teacher you have when it comes to language, they’re right. Or you might end up like me, who completely neglected to learn how passive sentence structure works in Japanese and had to study for hours to catch up.   

楽しく語学を学んで、がんばってください。好きになるかもしれませんよ！(๑>ᴗ<)