Development of Teaching Materials in Technical Japanese Education Toward Chinese Learners Who Are Majoring Social Sciences

Generally speaking, Japanese language learners who are native speakers of Chinese can learn Japanese language faster than the learners who do not know Kanji (Chinese characters). But when Chinese learners attempt to understand Japanese, they sometimes utilize their knowledge of Chinese characters and as the result of it, they misunderstand Kango (漢語 Japanese words of Chinese origin). For example, "差別" in Japanese means "discrimination", while the same "差別" in Chinese means "difference". "組合" in Japanese means "labor union" whereas "組合" in Chinese means "combine, match with". Similarly, "手紙" in Japanese means "letter", which in Chinese means "toilet paper". Moreover, the syntactic rules of these languages are completely different from each other. Therefore misunderstandings or errors happen to appear. Thus, the goal of this research is to analyze the differences between Japanese and Chinese, as well as to develop the teaching materials for Chinese learners based on the result of the analysis.This research project has published 6 theses. The findings shown clearly in these theses are: (1) while nouns of Kango are often used in literary expressions, adverbs of Kango are mostly used in oral communications and this is one the factors that causes native Japanese to feel an incongruity in compositions written by Chinese learners, (2) there is a tendency that despite a Kango being used as a verb in daily Japanese, it is often used only as a noun, especially in academic context, (3) certain kinds of the verbs (ex. "低下する", "対立する") are quite often written as "低下になる^*", "対立になる^*" by Chinese learners incorrectly. Our research has analyzed the reason of their making errors, (4)among technical terms of Kango in social sciences, which terms are different between Japanese and Chinese? Our research has pointed out this issue.As a result of this research, we produced 5 kinds of teaching materials focusing on Kango for Chinese learners.

Generally speaking, Japanese language learners who are native speakers of Chinese can learn Japanese language faster than the learners who do not know Kanji (Chinese characters). But when Chinese learners attempt to understand Japanese, they sometimes utilize their knowledge of Chinese characters and as the result of it, they misunderstand Kango (漢語 Japanese words of Chinese origin). For example, "差別" in Japanese means "discrimination", while the same "差別" in Chinese means "difference". "組合" in Japanese means "labor union" whereas "組合" in Chinese means "combine, match with". Similarly, "手紙" in Japanese means "letter", which in Chinese means "toilet paper". Moreover, the syntactic rules of these languages are completely different from each other. Therefore misunderstandings or errors happen to appear. Thus, the goal of this research is to analyze the differences between Japanese and Chinese, as well as to develop the teaching materials for Chinese learners based on the result of the analysis.This research project has published 6 theses. The findings shown clearly in these theses are: (1) while nouns of Kango are often used in literary expressions, adverbs of Kango are mostly used in oral communications and this is one the factors that causes native Japanese to feel an incongruity in compositions written by Chinese learners, (2) there is a tendency that despite a Kango being used as a verb in daily Japanese, it is often used only as a noun, especially in academic context, (3) certain kinds of the verbs (ex. "低下する", "対立する") are quite often written as "低下になる^*", "対立になる^*" by Chinese learners incorrectly. Our research has analyzed the reason of their making errors, (4)among technical terms of Kango in social sciences, which terms are different between Japanese and Chinese? Our research has pointed out this issue.As a result of this research, we produced 5 kinds of teaching materials focusing on Kango for Chinese learners.