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A review by foggy_rosamund
Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton
4.0
Each chapter in Fifty Sounds takes as a starting point a mimetic word in Japanese, i.e. a word that evokes a sound or, more broadly, a physical sensation. Japanese has a wider ranger of mimetic or onomatopoeic words than English, such as mushi-mushi, the sound of being steamed alive, or yochi-yochi, the sound of tottering like a small child. Barton uses these words to explore her fifteen years spent in Japan, as well as the ways in which we use language and what language learning feels like. She goes to Japan to teach English as a 22-year-old, and is placed in a rural school on a small island. Over time her relationship to Japanese and Japan develops and broadens: while very young, she has a relationship with an older married man, Y, and his influence helps her to develop her Japanese, but when she leaves him, her relationship to Japanese deepens as she learns new words obsessively and throws herself into language. I really enjoyed the experience of reading this book: the chapter are brief and engaging, and capture the mixture of overwhelming and fascinating that characterise immersing in a new language. Barton is often funny, self-deprecating and her work is full of anecdotes.
On a sentence by sentence level, I sometimes found her writing clunky: she uses clauses like "in fact" and "any yet" far too often, and her paragraphs can repeat the same thoughts, but she usually saves herself by providing a moment of insight or an interesting thought about how Japanese language works. She tries to distance herself from fetishizing Japan, something that is a common problem for outsiders in Japan, and I think she succeeds most of the time. Strangely, though, at times she seems blame her own emotional distress on elements of Japanese culture and society while it seemed that her problems were more to do with her age and loneliness. One of my biggest problems with this book was the way in which she wrote about learning a second language -- she chooses to learn Japanese and to immerse herself in Japan, but she doesn't acknowledge that many people learning a second language, especially English, don't have that choice. For immigrants and refugees the kind of immersion she chooses is forced, and speaking a second language poorly can have real consequences. Fifty Sounds is more interested in language-learning as a source of pleasure and intellectual curiosity, and that makes it pleasurable to read, but I wonder if different experiences of language-learning should have been acknowledged. That said, Barton does approach much of her work with nuance, and I found this book entertaining and vivid. The hook, of focusing on specific mimetic words, is really effective, and I appreciate how Barton balanced emotionally honesty and raw feeling with an exploration of words and learning.
On a sentence by sentence level, I sometimes found her writing clunky: she uses clauses like "in fact" and "any yet" far too often, and her paragraphs can repeat the same thoughts, but she usually saves herself by providing a moment of insight or an interesting thought about how Japanese language works. She tries to distance herself from fetishizing Japan, something that is a common problem for outsiders in Japan, and I think she succeeds most of the time. Strangely, though, at times she seems blame her own emotional distress on elements of Japanese culture and society while it seemed that her problems were more to do with her age and loneliness. One of my biggest problems with this book was the way in which she wrote about learning a second language -- she chooses to learn Japanese and to immerse herself in Japan, but she doesn't acknowledge that many people learning a second language, especially English, don't have that choice. For immigrants and refugees the kind of immersion she chooses is forced, and speaking a second language poorly can have real consequences. Fifty Sounds is more interested in language-learning as a source of pleasure and intellectual curiosity, and that makes it pleasurable to read, but I wonder if different experiences of language-learning should have been acknowledged. That said, Barton does approach much of her work with nuance, and I found this book entertaining and vivid. The hook, of focusing on specific mimetic words, is really effective, and I appreciate how Barton balanced emotionally honesty and raw feeling with an exploration of words and learning.