A Study of Cultural Differences in Second Language Sentence Structure

本研究首先认为，每个语言学习者都有自己的逻辑思维方式，这种思维方式受到每个人的文化背景的影响。假设了解并利用这些差异将对每个学习者的语言学习过程产生积极作用，我们比较了日语、英语、汉语和韩语四种语言对某些事情的描述的相似或不同之处。我们分析了日语公共文件中出现的句子及其翻译成上述其他语言的情况。我们认识到，那里的单词和句子受到每种语言的文化背景的强烈影响。因此，我们建议，如果学习者充分认识到母语和目的语的句子结构特点，那么在外语学习中“负迁移”将成为一种很好的学习策略。

This study begins with the idea that each language learner has his or her own way of logical thinking, which is affected by each one's cultural background. With the assumption that knowing these differences and utilizing them would work positively on each learner's process of language learning, we compared how similarly or differently certain things were described in the following four languages : Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean. We analyzed sentences that appeared in Japanese public documents and their translations into the other languages mentioned above. We recognize the words and sentences there are strongly affected by each language's cultural background. Thus, we suggest that"negative transfer"in studying foreign languages will become a good learning strategy if a learner comes to realize characteristics of sentence structures well enough in both the first and the target language.