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The Japanese Writing System

Challenges, Strategies and Self-regulation for Learning Kanji

Multilingual Matters

Introduction

An Overview of Japanese Language Education

The teaching and learning of Japanese language around the world is a relatively new area of study compared to traditional European languages, with most programs being established within the last 40 years. As such, relative to other European languages, little is known in regard to how it is acquired as a second language. Unlike the learning of European languages by other European language speakers, the learning of East Asian languages has predominantly developed after the Second World War. Interest in the learning of the Japanese language in Western countries was largely due to globalization, which brought the East and the West closer together economically and politically. Japanese language education first grew from the increasing economic strength of Japan, beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s. One driving force for language education growth was in response to an increase in tourism from Japan around the world. With a stronger economy came an increase in population mobility, which brought European language speaking nations such as France, the UK, the USA and Australia into direct contact with large numbers of Japanese tourists for the first time. The numbers of outbound tourists leaving Japan during this economic boom skyrocketed, as can be seen in Figure 1.1.

Also during this time, the global economy saw an influx of trade with Japan and closer economic and political relationships. In the 1970s, Japan grew to be the world's third largest economy and the nation soon became the second largest economy by 1980. With the growth of Japan on the global stage, the need to learn Japanese as a foreign language naturally grew. Nations such as Australia and the USA were quicker than others to fill a need for Japanese language programs, perhaps due to strong Pacific trade ties.

Interestingly, despite its recent entry among language study options, Japanese language education around the world has boomed (Bramley & Hanamura, 1998). Notably in the USA, Australia, New Zealand and the UK, the number of students enrolled in Japanese courses increased dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s, leading to the growth of Japanese language programs at the university level (Komiya-Samimy & Tabuse, 1992). In Australia, for example, Japanese quickly rose to prominence due to state government initiatives such as those by Education Queensland, which elevated Japanese as a major language study option in Queensland's public schools in the 1980s. Much of this push by governments in the 1980s to learn Japanese was due to financial incentives related the booming tourism and economic trade associated with Japan at the time.

Furthermore, Japan was viewed as a traditionally a monolingual, monoethnic and monocultural country (Noguchi & Fotos, 2001), with 98% of the population categorized as ethnically Japanese (Suzuki, 2006). Thus, there was a much larger perceived language barrier to overcome when conducting business with Japan as opposed to other Asian economic powers at the time, such as in Hong Kong and Singapore where English was widely used as the lingua franca of certain segments of education and governance. It was, therefore, deemed more desirable for students to learn Japanese in order to take advantage of these economic benefits compared to other Asian market countries, where English was more widely understood and used (e.g. Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong). For these reasons, the major driving force in the boom of Japanese education was largely due to government educational policy in countries that wanted to increase economic trade with Japan.

When the bubble economy of Japan burst, so did some of the driving forces for governments to promote Japanese language education. In the 1990s and 2000s, other languages such as Korean and Chinese rose to prominence for the very same reason that Japanese was promoted in the 1980s. These days we can see a similar situation to Japanese language education in the 1980s occurring in the push to learn Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language, in response to China's rise as the current second largest global economy.

Despite the economic shift in focus, however, Japanese language education has continued to boom around the world, although students' current reasons for wanting to learn it as a foreign language are no longer wholly centered on economic reasons. With the economic rise to prominence of Japan in the 1980s came an increase in cultural interest in Japan. The younger generation around the world, who had grown up knowing Japan as a world economic power, were also exposed to cultural aspects of Japan. This exposure in turn sparked interest in travel to Japan and interest in learning the Japanese language and culture. More recently, the world is witnessing an explosion of interest in anime and manga around the world, further fueling the younger generation's desire to learn the Japanese language and to go to Japan to study and experience Japan first-hand.

Evidence of the continued boom in Japanese language learning can be found by examination of the number of students taking the Japanese language proficiency test each year, which is an international, standard test of Japanese ability. The number of examinees in 1993 was 80,000, compared to 270,000 in 2003 and 560,000 in 2008 (Japan Foundation, 2009). Recent statistics from the Japan Foundation's Survey Report on Japanese-Language Education Abroad (Japan Foundation, 2013) also highlight an increase in Japanese language studies around the world. Table 1.1 shows the top 10 countries by Japanese language learners, with the change from 2009 to 2012 shown.

In conjunction with this increase in the number of students studying Japanese language, there has been an increase in the number of students travelling to Japan to study, as shown in Figure 1.2.

The Japanese Ministry of Education reported the number of foreign students (rounded to the nearest 1000) studying within Japan in 2003 numbered 109,000, compared with just 50,000 in 1993 and 10,000 in 1983 (MEXT, 2004). Of these 109,000 foreign students in 2003, 7000 were students at Japanese universities on short-term language programs of less than a year for the purpose of intensive language and cultural study (MEXT, 2004). In 2005, this number increased again to 122,000 (Guruz, 2008). Furthermore, a recent initiative by Japan's Ministry of Education plans to increase the number of foreign students in Japanese universities to 300,000 by the year 2020 (Shimauchi, 2009). Thus, it is clear that Japanese language education is an area of continued growth both in and outside of Japan. This growth in the teaching of Japanese language has also brought about a growth in educational research concerning the learning of Japanese as a foreign language, especially in the field of SLA, which has allowed us to better understand how students learn Japanese (Bramley & Hanamura, 1998).

Why a Book on Learning Japanese Writing?

Despite this surge in Japanese language education, there have been a number of studies that have highlighted students' difficulties in learning Japanese, which are linked to a higher attrition rate in Japanese language programs, especially if the students come from an English-speaking background (Kato, 2000, 2002). Hatasa (1989) and Dwyer (1997), for example, have found university students of Japanese are progressing more slowly in language development than students of other languages in terms of overall proficiency. A study by Walton (1993) reported that it took students of Japanese three times as long to acquire the same level of proficiency as more commonly taught languages such as French, German or Spanish. More recently, Everson (2011) used a study of language training required for State Department employees (Jackson & Malone, 2009) to suggest languages such as Japanese and Chinese take at least four times as long to acquire than European languages. Dwyer (1997) also found students of Japanese were not reading as much as students of European languages and suggested the problem appeared to be the insurmountable barriers posed by the Japanese writing system.

The Japanese writing system is particularly complex from a linguistic perspective. Generally speaking, the world's writing systems fall within three categories: morphographic scripts, syllabic scripts and alphabetic scripts.

Morphographic scripts represent morphemes in a language. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning that a word can be broken into. For example, the word black contains one morpheme. The word blackboard contains two: black and board, which each hold a meaning. The word unease also contains two morphemes: un and ease. Even though un is not an word in itself, it does hold meaning; it assigns the negative from to the morpheme which follows it. An example of a modern morphographic script is Chinese hanzi. This system of writing began as a logographic script (symbols representing words), and then later evolved into a morphographic script as more complex language required written representation. Even though historically most of the world's writing systems originated as logographs, Chinese is one of the few morphographic writing systems remaining (although in modern Chinese, many characters represent language phonologically). In Chinese, one morpheme is represented by one character. For example, the hanzi for unease contains too characters [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], one representing the negative un and the other representing ease.

Syllabic scripts represent syllables in the language (a syllabic script is often referred to as a sy syllabary). A syllable is the articulation of a single segment of uninterrupted sound, which includes a vowel, and often is preceded and/or succeeded by a consonant. The Japanese word maguro, contains three syllables ma, gu and ro. Thus, a syllabic script would need three separate characters to represent this word, one for each syllable. Japanese katakana is an example of a syllabic script, and thus the word maguro can be represented with three symbols: [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. Other well-known syllabaries include the historical Linear B, the Cherokee syllabary and the Vai syllabary.

Alphabetic scripts represent phonemes in a language. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that is distinguishable in speech. Most alphabetic scripts use one letter to represent a single sound. A well-known alphabet is the one in which this book is written, the Roman alphabet, which was developed to represent the Latin language. A word like agenda, for example, contains six phonemes, each represented by a letter. Interestingly, because the Roman alphabet was borrowed for the English language, the fit is not as exact (a phenomenon we will return to in the next chapter). We do not have enough letters in the Roman alphabet to represent all phonemes in the English language. To fit the English language, we would need at least six additional letters to represent vowels and we would need to repurpose other letters to represent those sounds that have no corresponding letter, such as the initial phonemes in the words think, they, genre and sheet.

As mentioned, the writing systems used to represent major world languages generally fall within one of these three groups. Mandarin and Cantonese are morphographic. English, Russian and Korean (Hangul) are alphabetic. Syllabic scripts are less common in representing modern languages, but ancient languages such as Mayan and Sumerian used syllabaries. Japanese, on the other hand, is highly unusual because of the fact that it uses a morphographic script, two syllabic scripts and an alphabetic script, side-by-side, to represent the language: kanji (morphographic), two forms of kana (syllabic) and romaji (alphabetic). In terms of the challenges this complex writing system causes learners in SLA, kanji appears to be the most difficult of these four scripts. Due to its representation of the morphemes in a language, rather than the phonology of a language, kanji is furthest removed from the writing systems that most of the world's learners are used to (except, of course, Chinese language speakers). Each kanji often has multiple readings, or ways of pronouncing a single character, depending on its context and use. Learners must know 2000 kanji to be functionally literate in the Japanese language. It is for this reason, that kanji will be the main focus of this book.

It is widely documented that Japanese foreign language learners struggle with the mastery of the Japanese written language, particularly if their first language's script is alphabetic (Rose & Harbon, 2013; Shimizu, 1995, 1999; Toyoda, 1998, 2000; Toyoda & Kubota, 2001). Many teachers and learners, therefore, seek assistance in order to help students of Japanese to overcome the barrier to literacy that not being able to read creates for learners of the language. Research into the second language learning of kanji, usually falls into three categories:

(1) The examination of learning strategies that successful learners use to memorize this difficult script.

(2) The examination of cognitive processes involved when learners of phonological writing systems encounter morphographic representations of language for the first time.

(3) The examination of self-directed learning (or self-regulation) utilized by learners in this arduous learning task.

This books aims to explore each of these areas in depth, to paint a full picture of the SLA of the Japanese written language.

This book is also intended as an important resource to summarize recent research on the topic of learning the Japanese writing system in terms of strategies students can use to learn this complex script. Language learning strategies are defined as specific actions, behaviors, steps or techniques that students use to improve their skills in a second language (Oxford, 2001). Research has also suggested that we examine learners' capacity to regulate the study of language and control their motivation to learn (see, for example, Dörnyei, 2005; Dörnyei & Skehan, 2003; Tseng et al., 2006). This book uses notions of learning strategies to examine the cognitive processes involved when memorizing and learning kanji, as it is a useful way to explore the mental activities and actions that learners deploy to learn more effectively. In terms of the psychological and behavioral aspects of learning, the book uses the framework of self-regulation. Self-regulation refers to the degree to which learners are active participants in their own learning and are proactive in their pursuit of language learning (Dörnyei, 2005). Thus, in terms of language learning, self-regulation culminates in the strategies students use to control motivation to learn, which Dörnyei (2005) terms as motivation control strategies. This book, therefore, examines the topic of kanji learning within these parameters of cognition, psychology and behavior.

In the past 30 years, there have been numerous and often singular research projects that examine many facets of learning the Japanese writing system in second language learning contexts. However, as of yet, there exists no single resource that ties this research together to give a clear picture of what previous studies have shown. This book also heavily draws upon my own research into kanji learning strategies that has spanned the past 10 years and covers Japanese language learning from elementary school to the university level. In this respect, the book is primarily a valuable resource for researchers of Japanese language education.

Furthermore, this book aims at making these research findings accessible to the Japanese language learner and instructor. Often, learners are bewildered by the task of kanji learning and, research has indicated that the attitudes of teachers towards teaching kanji and their own teaching strategies are multidimensional and complex (Shimizu & Green, 2002). Both teachers and learners are often told conflicting stories about strategies that work and do not work. A market that has been flooded with books that claim to teach students to learn kanji using 'simple' strategies does not help this situation. These books claim that kanji can be learned by mastering a singular 'foolproof' strategy such as the use of mnemonics devices (or stories) to help them remember kanji and their components. My research has shown these books can do more damage than good to the Japanese language learner, when they discover that mastering kanji is a much more complex task than is claimed, and a singular strategy to learn all kanji is clearly insufficient (Rose, 2013; see also Chapter 7, this volume). On the contrary, this book shows the learning and teaching of kanji is a complex and demanding task for the learner and instructor. Therefore, this book aims at dissecting what research has actually shown regarding kanji learning and disseminating it in easy to understand terms so that learners and instructors can be more aware of the strategies and processes needed to further improve their written proficiency in the Japanese language. This book integrates a number of my own original studies into Japanese language learning with modern research in order to provide a full picture of the complexity of studying the Japanese writing system.

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Excerpted from The Japanese Writing System by Heath Rose. Copyright © 2017 Heath Rose. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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