Listen Here
By Pulse Staff
There’s a straight line that runs from her father’s love of anime to Lilyenne Baker’s career path.
“When I was a kid, my dad was obsessed with anime, and he watched it all the time,” Baker said. “We both thought it might be a fun idea to learn Japanese together, and then it kind of sparked an interest in all sorts of different languages.”
Baker is a freshman at the University of Findlay double majoring in multi-age Japanese and psychology. She started studying Japanese in 8th grade. She went to Marysville High School in Marysville, Ohio, just a little more than an hour southeast of Findlay. Being the home of Honda means MHS had a robust Japanese program for her to utilize, and Marysville itself is the sister city of Yorii, located in the Saitama Prefecture of Japan.
“I was in Japan over the summer; I found it a little bit tricky communicating with my host family,” Baker said. Her trip was part of the Marysville-Yorii Student Exchange Program that the two cities established in 2015.
“I was there for almost two weeks. The first week, we stayed in a small town that is my hometown’s sister city,” Baker said. “The second week, we stayed in a hotel in Tokyo and took public transport to go touring around major cities around the area.”
Baker says the trip helped her to understand the culture more than the language.
“Actually seeing firsthand the way they live their lives…when I was there, I felt really welcomed, and I got to see the more casual aspect of everyday life,” Baker said. “I went to middle school, and I got to talk to 12-year-olds, and it was really nice.”
Baker is not only interested in Japanese. She says it was just the beginning of a journey that includes trying to understand other languages.
“I have dabbled in Russian and German,” Baker said. “When I was in 7th grade, I tried to teach myself the Russian alphabet, and I can still read it kind of today.”
She says the sociology and the history of how languages developed really interests her.
“When I’m studying languages, it’s really fun for me to recognize similarities in different language groups and things like that,” Baker said.
“There is a test that you take in high school, and it scores your listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills,” Baker said. “I’m scoring advanced in reading and writing and intermediate in listening and speaking.”
Baker says writing and reading Japanese is a little easier for her than speaking.
“One thing that is really difficult when learning the Japanese language is all of the different levels of respect that they have that completely modify the way that you’re speaking,” Baker said. “They have honorifics for names, objects, verbs, and there are different levels to it all. There are four types that I can tell you off the top of my head. Humble, casual, formal, and respectful. And it sounds completely different. Depending on what you’re using.”
Baker’s interest in other languages and psychology is her current drive in her education. And it all started with drawing on her father’s love of anime.
