The Dolphin patch that fixed the heat haze in Dragon Roost Island was also a single bit, changing a 3 to a 7 in source code, and also took several years.
(I'm assuming you are a Canadian student due to referring to the work as "Co-op")
In general, Canadian labour laws prohibit what are typically considered unpaid internships, although it varies slightly by province.[1][2] My understanding is that this is not the case across most of the United States.
A nice segue into a key point about Linguistics, and some Japanese facts.
The study of Linguistics, explicitly, does not deal with orthography, or the written system of languages. There are of course exceptions with good reasons, but orthography systems are rarely, if ever, good representations of the systems of auditory communication that are formally considered languages. An orthography system can be heavily influenced by geopolitics (Chinese), have severe ambiguities (Arabic, the various Latin alphabet systems), or have been created retroactively (many languages of indigenous peoples). While it is convenient to map a spoken language to its related orthography when discussing topics such as syllables, inflection, and morphology, it is rarely appropriate when studying linguistics formally.
As for Japanese, while it is true that its alphabet system has a relatively straightforward mapping to its phonology, the mapping itself is, unfortunately, not unambiguous. Japanese has a tonal system[1] that is not explicit in its orthography. There are examples of phonemically distinct words that are identical when written in hiragana/katakana.
Finally, there exists a moraic system[2] which sits between the phonemic and syllabic abstractions. Japanese, especially, have many phenomenons that cannot be adequately modelled unless working in this in-between system.
To English speakers, using different counters for different classes of nouns is a pretty strange feature...
Strange, perhaps, but present. To a native Chinese and Japanese speaker like myself, the list of collective nouns for animals in English is staggering, almost mindblowing, and appears absolutely arbitrary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_collective_nouns_by_sub...
I'm surprised no one has brought up how difficult it often is to incorporate design changes into an existing project unless it has been developed with such accommodations from day 1. Even a seemingly simple software project can be monstrously complex under the hood, and something as innocent as "this button should be larger than the rest" can mean weeks and months of proofing, coding, and testing. (e.g. Firefox 3's back button)
Whether a change comes in the form of code fixes, documentation improvement, refactoring, design changes, or infrastructural modifications, the burden of understanding the potential scope of damage and doing the actual work is always, always on the contributor. Convincing another to take on the work on their behalf is always a possibility, but it should not be hard to see why design changes proposed through such a channel will often be pushed to the back of the queue, unless for some dire need.
Designer or coder, there is no excuse for not doing due diligence in making sure a contribution is a good contribution.
Looking at the discussion so far, there appears to be at least some consensus that non-trivial effort above and beyond the (hopefully) expected hand-holding must be dedicated to designers in order for them to become good contributors. And, in corollary, the natural conclusion is that it's unrealistic to expect designers to put in the necessary effort to become good contributors on their own.
Following from the above, the more crucial questions, I think, are "How do we convince projects that they should go out of their way to attract designers", and, "Do you really need designers? Really, really, need them?"
