Chukyu nihongo gakushusha no sakubun ni okeru goi shiyo no goyo to mondaiten (Errors and Problems in the Use of Vocabulary in Compositions by Intermediate Learners of Japanese)

This paper investigates lexical errors and the unnatural use of words and phrases in compositions written by intermediate learners of Japanese who are studying at university in the UK. Having examined 16 short compositions written by eight students, 98 errors were identified.

Further qualitative analysis has suggested that these errors can be broadly categorized into the following five error types, namely 1) synonyms, polysemes and words with different nuances, 2) collocations and fixed expressions, 3) katakana or foreign loanwords, 4) direct translation from English, and 5) register.

Among these error types, type 1 was the most commonly observed error type followed by type 2, and only a fraction of errors were categorized as type 4. However, close investigation found that some of the errors which were categorized as type 1 and 2 may also stem from learners directly translating from English. As for the use of foreign loanwords, there were some cases where learners used katakana words which are either not commonly used in Japanese or through which the specific meanings of the original English words may not be correctly conveyed.

This study concludes that more effective ways of learning vocabulary, including the use of online learner corpora, need to be explored.