Development and Application of a Database of Japanese Kanji Vocabulary in Contrast to Chinese

Abstract

In this study, we developed a Database of Japanese Kanji Vocabulary in Contrast to Chinese (JKVC). Chinese-origin Japanese words (on-reading words) were classified into 6 types based on the semantic correspondence between Chinese cognates and their corresponding Japanese words, with reference to Agency for Cultural Affairs (1978) and Miura (1984). The result shows that, among the most frequent 20,000 words, 1) Chinese-origin words account for 50%, 2) 70% of Chinese-origin words (35% of all) are the same as their Chinese cognates in orthography (henceforth ʻisographicʼ), 3) while the other 30% of Chinese-origin words (15% of all) do not have corresponding cognates in modern Chinese, 4) 82% of the 7,074 isographic words (29% of all words, 58% of the Chinese-origin-words) are similar in both orthography and meaning, 5) while the other 18%, i.e., one out of 5 or 6 isographic words, are partially or totally different in meaning from their Chinese cognates. Learners need to be especially careful when acquiring these words. This database can be used directly for word searches. The utility of this database can also be heightened by incorporating it into a word frequency profiler such as J-LEX (Suganaga & Matsushita, 2014) to display lexical loads of texts and their readability scores depending on the userʼs first language, or to display important points for Chinese learners of Japanese using a pop-up function.