Case Examples of Two Students Learning Japanese

Two National Federation of the Blind stories provide a good starting point in understanding what challenges and solutions arise when blind and visually impaired students study a critical need language that doesn’t use the Latin alphabet.

Cory Klatik

As a freshman at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL), Cory Klatik became interested in studying the Japanese language. It seemed a logical choice since he was majoring in management information systems and international business and was also very interested in doing a year of study abroad. He had the same concerns that other students have about this prospective study, competitive grades and the expenses of travel, but what concerned Cory even more was his vision and the related obstacles that he would face in pursuit of his dream.

Cory has optic nerve hypoplasia, which affects him differently every day, leaving him with vision that ranges from enough sight to navigate without the use of his cane to absolutely no vision. Studying a complex foreign language and living in another country might have seemed impossible to some students, but not to Cory. After speaking with the study abroad coordinator in the Center for International Studies (CIS) at UMSL, Cory started to tackle the first challenge – learning the Japanese language…. Cory used a CCTV to enlarge everything that was presented in his textbooks. Sometimes this worked very well, and on other days, when his vision was low, he was able to read only a couple sentences to a paragraph.

Cory dedicated one to two hours a day to his studies as well as an additional hour spent with a private tutor who would walk through his homework assignments, verbalizing each printed word. Unlike his classmates, Cory did not have the visual prompts and punctuation cues printed in the text. “Forty percent of the learning process came through hearing, vocalizing, and memorizing what the tutors read or said. I would mimic the sounds in order to learn.”

Cory would have had to translate the verbal/written Japanese into Japanese braille, and he learned both the Japanese language and the Japanese braille code at the same time, so braille was not an option. When it came to the written aspect of the language, many enlargements were made, sometimes as large as one symbol per sheet of paper. Each day provided its own unique experience in handwriting symbols and determining the size necessary for that given moment. Many times tutors used hand-over-hand demonstration to assist Cory with muscle memory. Working closely with his instructor, Elizabeth Eckelkamp, Cory was not only passing his Japanese class, he was getting an A and was ready to revisit [the study abroad office]….

[To prepare to study in Japan] he spoke intensively with the disability access office at UMSL and spent two and a half weeks preparing a document that detailed each aspect of every accommodation he was using. For example, Cory described why he needed written items enlarged and exactly how it was done (font size, step-by-step copying directions, percentage of increase of size, etc.), even converting our standard measurements to metric. In addition to the accommodations provided by Obirin University [in Japan], which included personal emails each morning with lecture material and handouts, Cory relied on his own CCTV for text-enlargement.

Cory’s knowledge and familiarity with assistive technology was one of the key elements that made study abroad possible. Digital files are widely used in Japan, and rarely were paper copies handed to him. He relied heavily on JAWS with a Japanese synthesizer, which he purchased on his own. He also used ZoomText to read some Japanese Web sites that JAWS was unable to make accessible. In Cory’s opinion, without the features of these assistive devices along with his extensive knowledge of their capabilities and uses, study in Japan would have been nearly impossible.

(Excerpted from a full online article in Braille Monitor, June 2007, “From St. Louis to Japan: A Study Abroad Experience” by Rachel Sommerer found at: http://www.nfb.org under: Publications, Braille Monitor, Online Archives 2000 to Present)

Catherine Mendez

Catherine Mendez, as a student at Cornell University and the president of the New York Association of Blind Students, always did things that forced her out of her comfort zone and challenged her. [In 2005], Catherine visited Japan, where she had an outstanding study abroad experience. Here she shares a story from that trip.

Making the decision to study in Japan was actually quite simple. In fact, it was probably the easiest part of the entire study abroad process. I started at Cornell [University] as a Political Science major with a focus on International Relations and East Asian Studies and, although by the time my junior year rolled around my academic interest had shifted to Linguistics, I was still taking six hours of Japanese a week and filling my elective slots with courses on Asian history and religion. That being the case, it seemed quite natural that I should spend my semester abroad at International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo, which offers a fully bilingual, multi-disciplinary curriculum in addition to intensive Japanese language courses….

I could tell that the academic staff at ICU was a little bit concerned – several blind Japanese students were attending the university at the time, but until that point there hadn’t been any blind international students. They wanted to know how I was going to survive with limited Japanese language skills – it’s an extremely difficult language to master and even with two years of fairly intensive instruction my vocabulary and communicative skills were limited to a range of basic topics. They were worried about how I was going to access my textbooks and other classroom materials…. My Japanese teachers seemed to relax after I aced my fifth or sixth straight grammar quiz and got full marks on the midterm….

Academically things proceeded without any real problems. The Japanese course at Cornell uses a Latin form of the language for the first two years of instruction, so accessing the material in braille had never been an issue. However, in Japan, of course they were using a textbook written entirely in Japanese characters, which posed something of a translation problem. There was no program like [Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic], at least not one that I had access to as an international student, but my professors were tremendously supportive. They recorded the Japanese language textbooks onto cassettes for me, and were willing to give me my exams orally.

Several times a week the class practiced kanji, the Japanese graphic writing system, and during those times, I was able to arrange for one of the other blind students to teach me Japanese braille. I never did get fast enough to do my Japanese coursework in braille, but I did learn enough to enable me to read the signs on elevators, restrooms and the ticket machines at the train station. Because ICU offers courses taught in both English and Japanese, I was able to take four mainstream academic courses in addition to the ten hours a week of language instruction. Accessing the textbooks and research materials for those classes was easy, since I had brought my computer and scanner with me from the States and everything was in English.

(Excerpted from the Student Slate, in spring/summer 2005, from the article “Two A.M. in a Foreign City” by Catherine Mendez at: http://www.nfb.org/Images/nfb/Publications/slate/slss0508.htm)

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