Analysis Of Acquisition Errors In Chinese-japanese Homographs Of Adjectives Among Japanese Students

There are many characters which have similar shapes in Chinese and Japanese languageswhich are called “homographs”. To some extent, the massive existence of homographs makeslearning and communicating between Chinese and Japanese a lot easier, however it alsocreates misunderstanding and mistranslation at the same time. Researches have shownprogressive results in the reason why homograph was used, its categories, differences in theirmeanings and properties, but few studies have shown the differential analysis of homographcharacters used as adjectives.Using Chinese Proficiency Test (Level3) vocabularies as basis of the study,56characters were identified in these theses which are used as adjective homographs in bothChinese and Japanese, and errors were collected from “Beijing Language and CultureUniversity HSK dynamic composition corpus” by two methodologies: search by characterand search by phrase. According to the statistical data, the errors were further specified intofour categories: written form, mistranslated form, word-absent form and word-duplicate form.By analyzing specific sentences as examples, three major reasons for the errors wereconcluded: Negative transfer of mother tongue, disregardful of Chinese character teachingand uncertainty of homo-synonym meanings. In summary, actions should be taken to avoiddeveloping homograph error such as increase teaching sources of Chinese characters, enhancethe analysis of Chinese-Japanese synonyms and Grammar Teaching, and train moreJapanese-speaking personnel as Chinese tutors.