Analyzing Non-medical Non-general Vocabulary in Order to Select Words to Be Learned in Japanese Language Education

Abstract

Aiming to select words that have been potentially ignored both in Japanese language education for medical purposes and in medical education, we analyzed words that are neither medical terms nor general words. First, we extracted words that were significantly representative of the National Examination for Medical Practitioners, comparing word frequency in the exam to the "Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese" by calculating the log-likelihood ratio of each word. Then we extracted the words that were included as headwords or as part of headwords in the Japan Medical Associationʼs "Japan Medical Terminology Web Edition"; however, we excluded those included in the "Japanese Learnersʼ Dictionary Ver. 1.0." We confirmed that a certain number of words are considered as being neither medical nor general, and they account for 12.5% of all words (272 words). Words with frequencies of 5 were analyzed in detail, and it was concluded that these could be classified into 8 categories, such as "parts of a body or location within a body" and "medical conditions of patients." Among these words, there are some that are not used in a non-medical context.