Abstract

Japanese is considered one of the most difficult foreign languages. A major factor is the complex Japanese orthography consisting of thousands of logographic kanji (adapted Chinese characters) and 105 phonetic kana (subdivided into hiragana and katakana). This situation leads to hardships in learning to read Japanese, discouraging students from tackling authentic texts full of unknown kanji symbols. Online language tools might assist and encourage learners to read authentic texts, reducing reading anxiety. To evaluate the potential of this learning support, an experimental study was conducted. Twelve Italian college students with elementary Japanese proficiency participated. They completed two homework reading tasks with the use of online language tools, taking a post-task survey. Three findings emerge from the data: 1) using online tools enables students to read authentic texts; 2) using more tools makes it easier and faster to comprehend texts; 3) students strongly feel that the use of online tools helps to read Japanese texts and reduces their psychological block, willing to continue to use them. Overall, the results show the positive effects of using the tools on both reading performance and psychology, suggesting the potential effectiveness of the use of online language resources for learning to read Japanese texts.

Highlights

  • Japanese is considered one of the most difficult foreign languages

  • The data collected with the procedure described in the previous section were analyzed for each dependent variable

  • The Responses of the post-task survey were analyzed to see how the use of the online tools was perceived by the students (Section 4.3)

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Summary

Introduction

Japanese is considered one of the most difficult foreign languages. It is well known that one of major factors is the very complex Japanese orthography. The world has been going through a growing process of interaction between people, which is leading to increasing demand in linguistic and cultural mediation among speakers of various languages. Under these circumstances, language education is more important than ever. Japanese is one of the most widely spoken and studied languages in the world. It is spoken by more than 120 million people: ranked ninth in the list of languages by total number of native speakers.[1]. Learners of Japanese as foreign or second language are widely spread across the world, and their linguistic backgrounds vary greatly. Japanese is studied by approximately 3.4 million learners in 137 countries.[2]

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