Connecting Kanji Radicals with their Malay Equivalents in Japanese Kanji Instruction to Native Malay-speaking Students

Kazuhito Uni

doi:10.17576/gema-2019-1904-07

Abstract

The current methods to teach Kanji characters in Malaysian Japanese-language textbooks limit students’ understanding of the semantic link between the Kanji characters and their radicals. Therefore, the objective of this study is to examine the effectiveness of teaching Chinese characters ( Kanji ) using the major components (radicals), along with their Malay equivalents. This study proposed a method to connect the meaning of Kanji radicals with their Malay equivalents when teaching Kanji characters to native Malay speakers. A multiple-choice test was administered to 116 native Malay-speaking university students. They had no previous knowledge of the Japanese or Chinese languages. Participants studied a list of Malay words and their Japanese equivalents comprising 28 Kanji. Each Kanji pair in the list shared a common radical, and each pair of their Malay equivalents shared a common root. The control group was given a list of the spellings and pronunciation of same Japanese and Malay words but without the instructions regarding the semantic similarities between Japanese and Malay. Both groups were given 30 minutes to learn the Kanji and another 30 minutes to take an identical 28-question test. On average, the experimental and control groups scored 17.03 and 10.58, respectively ( n = 116); therefore, at a 5% level, a significant difference was found between the scores for the two groups ( p < 0.001, t = 8.10). A multiple linear regression indicated that the experimental group had an effect size of 6.4 more correct answers than the control group ( df = 114, R 2 = 0.3651, p < 0.001). The results imply that the explicit presentation of the Kanji radicals and their Malay equivalents assisted native Malay-speaking students in learning Kanji including characters which consist of more than 10 strokes.

Highlights

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE JAPANESE LANGUAGELearning vocabulary is one of the most important elements in language learning
The objective of this study is to examine the effectiveness of teaching Kanji characters using Kanji radicals, along with semantically similar Malay equivalent words, to facilitate the learning of Kanji characters by native Malay-speaking university students in Malaysia
The method suggested in this study explicitly demonstrated the semantic similarities between Malay words and Kanji characters in their Japanese equivalents

Summary

Introduction

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE JAPANESE LANGUAGELearning vocabulary is one of the most important elements in language learning. 13), 33,224 Malaysians have studied the Japanese language; the number of learners and textbooks has been increasing. One of the primary reasons for this difficulty is the use of Chinese characters in the Japanese language known as Kanji. Chikamatsu (2005) indicates that learners of Japanese as a foreign language (hereafter JFL), whose first language has a phonological writing system frequently face difficulties in learning Kanji characters. In this study, the term Kanji is employed for Chinese characters that are currently used in Japanese. This is because Kanji do not have systematic one-to-one correspondence between their components and pronunciation

Results

Discussion

Conclusion