Learning strategies employed by Chinese-background learners in learning Japanese vocabulary

Abstract

The major objective of this study is to investigate whether Chinese-background learners (CBLs) use effective strategies to learn Japanese kanji words. How do these learners use their L1 knowledge in memorising and guessing Japanese kanji words? Five native Chinese speakers enrolled in a beginner Japanese course at an Australian university were asked to take a kanji writing test, and were interviewed individually immediately after it. The findings are as follows: (1) it is an effective strategy to use the Chinese meaning and sound that comes with the orthography in memorising Japanese kanji words; (2) in memorising Japanese kanji words, the degree of orthographical similarity between Japanese and Chinese is not always directly proportional to the difficulty of memorisation; and (3) the semantic aspect of lexical information is more important and more frequently used than the phonetic when CBLs guess Japanese kanji words. These findings indicate that CBLs associate Japanese kanji words with the Chinese to effectively memorise and guess kanji words. CBLs tend to assist memorisation by making various kinds of associations even for those words which do not share orthography with Chinese.