Karen Ogulnick's Narrative

Karen Ogulnick is a Jewish-American woman in her early thirties who came to Japan to teach English in high schools. At first, she tried avoiding learning Japanese because she thought it was impossible, had no time to study, the Japanese Ministry of Education was not paying her to speak Japanese, and did not consider herself a good language learner. It was only after an old lady on the bus talked to her in Japanese that she realized that she had subconsciously picked up some Japanese and could understand some of what they old lady was saying that she began to pursue learning it. Most of her efforts to learning the language are through interactions with native speakers.
Saville-Troike & Barto (2017) defines learning strategies as “the behaviors

193). The author’s own personality has been shaped by her upbringing and affected her language learning. Ogulnick recalls incidents from her childhood and relates the fears she felt then to her fears speaking Japanese and saying something wrong. She mentions being embarrassed of not being able to speak well in several situations such as exchanging money at the bank, meeting Satoko’s mother, and several more. In one incident she had to go to the doctor for her eye. She describes the doctor talking in a way that she could not understand which caused her anxiety to be heightened due to the linguistic and cultural barrier. Ortega (2008) describes “learning and using a foreign language as a threat to one’s ego because it makes people vulnerable – particularly grown-ups who are accustomed to function perfectly well in their own language” (p. 192). In Ogulnick’s case she felt vulnerability with not being able to communicate with somebody in a higher position than herself. She also expresses frustration and annoyance when practicing Japanese with Keio whenever he would interrupt her in order to translate words that she did not understand from Japanese to English. Part of her frustration is due to the fact that Keio did not seem to understand that she would rather the words be explained in simple Japanese. Working with Keio seemed to increase her anxiety in language learning more compared to other language exchanges she had in Japan. She states that because of him correcting every mistake that she made, she became conscious of making a lot of mistakes and in turn spoke hesitantly and softly. Dörnyei (2014) states that the researchers MacIntyre and Charos “found that global personality traits were implicated in the