Hokkaido, JAPAN – A-I-U-E-O. The first five vowel sounds of Japanese, the most fundamental building blocks of speech.
When learning a language, where do you begin? Memorizing new vocabulary? Tracing through basic grammar, or studying the spelling of your name? Counting to 10?
No matter the first steps, I believe the secret lies in embracing the unknown.
Though there are many stepping stones to accomplishing that goal, my recommendation is … picture books!
From three years of high school Japanese classes, I’ve gained an assortment of language skills – methods of re-learning to read in a new writing system, strategies for creating different forms of verbs and adjectives, and ways of deciphering increasingly complex sentence structures.
Still, before the opportunity to live and go to school in Japan for around a month, where, for the first time, I consistently heard those vowels suspended in the air in everyday conversation, encountering new words felt less like real understanding and more like a puzzle.
To my relief, over time, sounds began to acquire their meaning faster.
How did that happen? Immersion. And, picture books.
The first time I visited the ehonkan – the picture-book library – Kutchan, Hokkaido was almost by accident. One afternoon, I decided I had spent enough time walking the familiar route from my host family’s house to the grocery store; instead of veering right at the town’s main intersection, I turned left.
After following the sidewalk across a few traffic lights, I found myself outside the library.
Kutchan’s ehonkan is inside a short trailer building painted an unassuming shade of dark blue. Though it was offset from the road, I spotted an arrow pointing toward a small staircase leading to an open door.
A sign outside – “We hope you will find another world” – seemed like an invitation to explore a corner of Kutchan I hadn’t expected to find.
Uncertain, I glanced at my phone screen. 4:30 pm on a Wednesday?
They were open, according to a poster on the window. I walked up the steps.
Inside, everything was curated for curiosity. Overhead, lights were soft, filtered through leaf-shaped cutouts decorating the walls, and the smell of old paper blended with a circulating current of air from a fan in the corner.
I traced my fingers over familiar covers of translated classics like Corduroy and The Lorax, as well as longer Japanese chapter books that felt just out of reach.
The ehonkan became a go-to destination during those early weeks in Hokkaido. Picture books, with their vivid illustrations and simple sentences, offered an entry point to the more complex Japanese I navigated in daily life.
One of the first books I picked up was a Japanese translation of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.
As a child, I had read that book countless times in English, but now it offered new surprises. The familiar illustrations were the same, yet this new way of reading required me to slow down and absorb each word, syllable by syllable, so I felt like I was unraveling the story all over again.
My immersion also extended beyond the ehonkan. One Thursday morning, I stood in front of a second-grade classroom at a local elementary school, where my host mother was assigned to volunteer for the day. Their curious eyes mirrored my own.
In their main library, sunlight trickled through high windows, casting a golden square over bookshelves closest to the entrance. I was supposed to momentarily take over for the teacher by reading a story to the class. My first reading was a picture book about fruit – one of the simplest topics I could choose.
But its simplicity was deceiving. After I finished, the students peppered me with questions.
How do you say ‘pear’ in English? What about ‘watermelon?’ Before I knew it, we had migrated to a lively exchange about animals—kuma for bear, inu for dog, hitsuji for sheep.
There was no avoiding the necessity to try – to say things wrong, to misinterpret questions, to look words up and write them down until they became second nature. In that way, those elementary school children were my language tutors as much as I was theirs, and their enthusiasm to learn reminded me of the joy that comes from curiosity and openness.
The catalyst for our conversation was a picture book.
So, even though I didn’t expect to find a picture-book library in a rural Japanese town, I returned week after week. By the time I left Kutchan, I felt like I had collected my own library of moments: the unexpected discovery of the ehonkan, the warmth of the elementary school, and the laughter of second-graders who saw me more as a fellow student than a teacher.
Whether it’s a library, a grocery store, or your host family’s living room, learning a new language requires you to make it a part of your everyday surroundings. In the ehonkan, books completely absorbed my attention as I tried to make sense of new words without a dictionary and study the pictures to gather clues from my memory.
Immersion, it turns out, doesn’t have to mean being tossed into the deep end.
In another language, familiar stories can take on new meaning and purpose. That’s the secret from the hours I spent returning to picture books.
If you’re ever lost in a new language, look for the smallest door you can find, even if it’s hidden in a trailer on a quiet street with an inviting (and maybe a bit cryptic) sign.
A visit to your local library is never a bad idea.
Annamika Konkola is a Senior Reporter with Youth Journalism International.
