This study is a follow-up to Nishikawa et al. (2015), which reported that some JSL (Japanese as a Second Language) children were not able to produce basic Japanese verbs as readily as their monolingual counterparts, even though those JSL children were born/raised in Japan and had nativelike conversational proficiency. The current study adds analyses of the vocabulary growth of the monolingual (n=1,333) and JSL (n=163) groups. Study 1 examined the difference in total scores of the two groups and concluded that although both groups showed significant gain, the difference between the two groups persisted in the upper grades. With additional data from 60 monolingual kindergarteners, Study 2 looked at the accuracy scores for individual items. Neither the monolingual group nor the JSL groups performed well with items that described actions with which they had less experience; however, JSL children seemed to struggle more in acquiring Japanese vocabulary than monolingual children.

The overseas spread of the Japanese language is regarded as a “priority area” for international cultural exchange activities. To date, however, no large-scale and comprehensive investigation has been undertaken focusing on Japanese citizens’ awareness regarding activities for spreading the Japanese language.

In light of this situation, the author carried out an online survey of awareness regarding activities for spreading the Japanese language among approximately 5,400 participating adult men and women of Japanese nationality. The results indicate that activities for increasing the number of Japanese language learners (i.e., efforts to spread the Japanese language) were not necessarily regarded as a priority area among international cultural exchange activities as a whole, and were moreover not highly evaluated in comparison with the phenomenon of an increase in the number of Japanese language learners, particularly among younger demographics. Furthermore, differences in generational awareness were found in regards to both efforts to spread the Japanese language and the phenomenon of an increase in the number of Japanese language learners. This paper gives an overview of these survey results.

This paper attempts to clarify the usage of Japanese conditional -to by intermediate and advanced-level Korean Japanese learners (Korean Japanese learners), by comparing it with usage by native speakers of Japanese, focusing on conjectural modality in the main clause. The results of the analysis are as follows. 1) Korean Japanese learners tend to use conjectural modality, especially to omou, in the main clause, which follows the clause marked by -to expressing a hypothetical condition, whereas native speakers of Japanese rarely use such modality. This probably results from the tendency of Japanese learners to use to omou frequently, and from the difference between Korean Japanese learners and native speakers of Japanese in their awareness of the function of sentences using -to. 2) Most of uses of -to by Korean Japanese learners to mark hypothetical conditions are errors for -ba. This suggests that Korean Japanese learners confuse -to with -ba even at the intermediate and advanced levels, and that in order to reduce such errors it is necessary to explain -to and -ba to Korean Japanese learners, focusing on the difference in the relationship between antecedent and consequent clauses.

Second language learners of Japanese tend to use ni instead of de erroneously (Ano kissaten ni kohii o nomu. ‘I drink coffee at that coffeeshop.'). This study explores how learners come to confuse the goal particle ni with the locus-of-activity particle de. We used a particle choice test (e.g. Ano resutoran {ni / de / o / kara} gohan o taberu.) and an interview after three pilot tests, which included a translation test. The results showed that there was confusion between the goal particle ni and the locus-of-activity particle de. We expect these learners reach the next stage of using the two particles correctly after passing through this stage of using ni instead of de.

This study examines native speakers' perceptions of the second person pronoun anata ‘you' in Japanese. It uses the results of a questionnaire given to speakers of the Tokyo variety of Japanese in January, 2014.

The respondents indicated that as a regular address term, they very rarely used anata in any of the following cases: when referring to an addressee of higher status; when referring to an addressee of lower status; and when referring to an addressee of equal status. Instead, they expressed a number of perceived incongruities in the use of the term. Their perceptions included such contradictory views as ‘it is rude' or ‘it sounds too formal'.

An analysis of these results supports the notion that the use of anata absolutely specifies a second person without indexing any social attributes of the interlocutors. It does not inherently have the property of indicating the speaker's biographical characteristics or of indicating the degree of politeness. The study explains the mechanisms that lead to anata having such a socially inert role, which in turn allows its use to occur in limited contexts as well as to create disparate perceptions among native speakers. This also explains why anata has never been accepted as a general form of second person address even after The National Language Council of Japan defined anata as a ‘standard' address term in the proposal Kore kara no Keigo (Honorifics From Now On) in 1952.

In this paper, I make a comparison between the method of using only a Japanese-English bilingual dictionary (hereinafter, the DIC method) and the method of using both a Japanese-English bilingual dictionary and a lexical profiling tool (hereinafter, the DIC-LP method), in a collocation test.

The results of the experiment reveal that the scores obtained with the DIC-LP method were significantly higher. The negative effects of the DIC method on the scores were due to: (1) insufficient appropriate translations, (2) insufficient expressions that are the answers or lead to the answers, (3) multiple translations with inadequate information to understand their differences, (4) an excessive number of translations, (5) incorrect analogy by the learners, and (6) not confirming answers with multiple dictionaries. In contrast, the DIC-LP method had positive effects on the scores as it allowed learners to (1) consider the meanings using the list of collocations and (2) confirm the presence or absence of collocations as well as the number of collocations. As a result, a significant difference was observed between the two methods. It was also revealed that an excessive number of example sentences and incorrect guesses at the use of postpositional particles were factors that created negative effects on the scores in the collocation test with the DIC method. On the other hand, incorrect guesses at the use of postpositional particles and not being able to narrow down the verb candidates using the dictionary were factors that created negative effects on the scores with the DIC-LP method.

It is often said that native Chinese speakers have trouble mastering the various usages of causative sentences in Japanese, but how they actually use such sentences remains to be clarified. This paper clarifies how Taiwanese learners of Japanese employ different usages of causative Japanese sentences, based on the LARP results of the SCU essay corpus analysis. The transitive usage of causative sentences was found to have both the highest overall use rate and the highest rate of misuse, followed by their psychological and basic usage respectively. In the case of the transitive usage, misuse stems from the non-use or overuse of saseru as well as the non-use of transitive and intransitive verb pairs. These result from the speaker not yet having mastered the transitive and intransitive usages of Japanese verbs, an overgeneralization of the particle ni (which marks the causee) in the case of psychological usage, and confusing the causative constructions with the -te morau construction in the case of basic usage. Additionally, though the misuse rate for the basic usage of causative sentences was found to be consistently low, regardless of years of study, the misuse rate for their transitive and psychological usages remains high. Thus, from the perspective of Japanese language education, the mastery of causative sentences can be accelerated by focusing on teaching the transitive and psychological usages of causative sentences.