Preliminary Studies Towards Systematizing the Teaching of Japanese as a Foreign Language

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Main objectives of this research project have been(1) to construct asensible grammar of Japanese for foreign learners,(2) to compile acomputerized database of present-day written Japanese large enough to yield possible syntactic types and collocational patterns, and(3) to put together an activator-type lexicon of basic Japanese predicates.As to the first objective of theorizing, a grammar based on case-marker alignment has been found particularly useful and practical as directly combining syntactic structures and actual usage. Two ps have been taken in this respect : first to enumerate currently used case patterns, and then to give theoretical grounds for reducing the number to several types fundamental both for grammatical description and lerner's dictionary. Building up a database, however, involved unexpected amount of manual editing owing to the inefficiency of the OCR,and computerizing some eight thousand printed pages was the utmost we could achieve, and it is to be feared that the rapid increase in market versions of electronic texts and search tools somewht detracted from the public utility of our database.