2017 Volume 20 Issue 1 Pages 29-41
In this study, we address problems related to designing universally accessible Japanese for people who have difficulty comprehending native-level Japanese. Such people include non-native Japanese speakers, people with physical and intellectual disabilities, children, and older people. As a first step toward this goal, we compared three types of Japanese news articles on the same topic. The sources were Stage, a quarterly newspaper for people with mild intellectual disabilities, News Web Easy, an online daily news compilation that Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) produces for foreign residents in Japan, and NHK's regular online news. We compared the vocabulary used and difficulty levels.
We specifically found that Stage and News Web Easy both used difficult verbs, loanword nouns, proper nouns such as titles, and descriptors of people. Stage contained difficult conjunctions and adverbs, while these were simplified in News Web Easy. Stage also, uniquely, used the same verbs in several inflectional forms without rewording. Our future work will address broader, more precise comparisons among the three article types. We will study Japanese compiled for people with intellectual disabilities, which has been studied less extensively than Japanese for non-native speakers, and propose practical plans for effectively providing information for people dealing with Japanese language barriers.
