“LEARNING JAPANESE IS A HEADACHE FOR ME”: AN INVESTIGATION OF ENGLISH MAJORS’ LEARNING JAPANESE AS A SECOND LANGUAGE IN CHINA

Abstract

With the development of economic globalization in the past decades, the demand for Japanese-speaking talents has been increasing and an unprecedented upsurge of learning Japanese has appeared at tertiary education in China. In terms of English majors, not only are they stipulated to lay a solid foundation for English, but they also need to take another foreign language course and meet corresponding requirements. Due to the national and international environment nowadays, more and more English majors make their own choices in learning Japanese as another foreign language. However, compared with studies focusing on Japanese major education, research concerning non-major education, including English majors’ learning Japanese as a second language, is still scant. The questionnaires and interviews conducted at a university in Jiangsu, China indicated that English majors’ Japanese learning was somewhat problematic, which included poor motivations, inappropriate learning habits, and some apparent learning difficulties. Actually, it is found that both subjective elements (i.e. emotional resistance and discrimination, unawareness of the importance of Japanese, inappropriate learning methods) and objective elements (i.e. misallocation of time and class periods, disadvantages of the teaching material) contributed to the situation. Therefore, learning strategies have been put forward in this paper to help students optimize their learning. Article visualizations: