Researchers and graduate students focusing on Japanese studies are often required to read a Classical Chinese text kanbun, using a Japanese method of reading “kundoku”. Learning kanbun-kundoku for beginners involves various difficulties. The lack of introductory teaching materials is one of these. In this paper, we suggest four-character idioms as one kind of material at the introductory stage of kanbun-kundoku education, and inquire into the effective methods of its’ usage. First of all, we introduce the results of a dictionary survey, listing up 1377 four-character idioms with kundoku-reading provided. Then, we present a method of classification for these idioms from a standpoint of kanbun-kundoku education, focusing on usage of return marks “kaeriten”. Next, we introduce top 15 four-character idioms, out of 108 idioms with the usage examples discovered in the "Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese". Moreover, we measure the degree of difficulty of each character, by using the software "Reading Tutor". In conclusion, basing on the above-mentioned research and analysis, we provide several recommendations on how to select and use four-character idioms as study material, e.g. grammar examples or exercises, according to the students’ needs.
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