When studying a language, we tend to be attracted its unique elements, that we cannot trace elsewhere or in our own mother tongue. These distinctive characteristics are especially important because they offer us an insight into the way others think and perceive the world, but at the same time it means we have to change or update our own world view, which is not at all simple. Our focus is on Japanese mimetics, a field of study that first received attention among Japanese linguists in the 1980’s, where it took on the name onomatope. In contrast, there is still relatively little interest among Western linguists for this word class. This work seeks the reasoning behind the frequent neglect of the study of Japanese mimetics, examines the interpretation of the Slovenian word onomatopeja, which is the counterpart to the Japanese onomatope, and with a general overview of current literature presents the basic terminology, used to describe Japanese mimetics. Furthermore, we offer our own terminology proposal for future research on this subject in Slovene. Finally, we justify teaching of Japanese mimetics to L2 learners and examine the methods for effective teaching and learning of Japanese mimetics.
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