This book showcases the Japanese writing system, focusing on the challenges it poses for the second language learner, the second language teacher and applied linguistic researchers who are interested in implications for Second Language Acquisition (SLA). It is the result of more than 13 years of research into the teaching and learning of Japanese, however, my positioning of the Japanese writing system in this volume is more than an academic one; the idea to begin research into the SLA of Japanese – and particularly its writing system – grew from my own struggles with learning the language, as well as my struggles in teaching it.

A Personal Rationale

I first began learning Japanese as a high school student in a rural town in Queensland, Australia. My town was very small and the high school could only offer the bare minimum of core subjects that schools needed to offer. Language was usually compulsory for all first year high school students, but when I entered high school in 1989, the German teacher had left and was yet to be replaced, resulting in my grade missing the opportunity to learn a language. I had always had an interest in languages – I suspected I might be quite good at them – so I dabbled a bit in self-study of Japanese via cassettes and workbooks. I had chosen Japanese because, at the time, the rhetoric in Australia was that Japanese was the most useful language to learn due to our growing trade and economic ties with Japan. In addition, Europe seemed very distant from Australia to my 14-year-old self, so I did not have the same interest in German or French, as I could not see an immediate opportunity to use these languages in my future. When I entered Years 11 and 12 in high school, the state education system required students to undertake six eligible high school subjects, of which just five were used to calculate university entrance scores.