Abstract
Recently, there has been an increase in the number of international students in Japanese medical schools. For those students, intensive support for learning Japanese as it is used in the medical sciences is essential. In this study, we carried out a comparison of verbs used in four typical medical textbooks and verbs identified using the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ). Frequently used verbs in medical textbooks were identified using morphological analysis, then their usage was carefully examined. Commonly used verbs such as suru, aru, iru topped the list of frequently used words in medical textbooks, but we also observed unique verbs not listed in the former Japanese Language Proficiency Test word list. From the top 30 high frequency verbs in medical textbooks, we selected eight verbs whose usage frequency was significantly higher than in the BCCWJ frequency list for a more detailed examination. Our analysis revealed that (1) certain verbs in medical textbooks (e.g., mitomeru, kitasu, utagau) have a different or more narrow meaning than in the BCCWJ, and (2) other verbs (e.g., tomonau, shojiru) have a different usage from that in the BCCWJ.
