An Empirical Study Of Japanese College Students’ Ability To Recognize And Read Chinese Characters

The teaching of Chinese characters is an important content of Chinese as a second language teaching.Students’ acquisition of the form,pronunciation,and meaning of Chinese characters more or less affects the overall improvement of their Chinese reading and writing,which in turn affects the overall Chinese proficiency of the students.Previous studies on Chinese character teaching focused on non-Chinese character cultural circles,while students in the Chinese character cultural circle paid little attention to the acquisition of Chinese characters.Research on Chinese character acquisition also focused on writing problems and paid insufficient attention to the recognition and reading of Chinese characters.Japan belongs to the cultural circle of Chinese characters.Japanese students are generally better at writing Chinese characters,but is the recognition and reading the same? Therefore,it is necessary to explore the ability of Japanese college students to recognize and read Chinese characters.This not only helps to deepen the understanding of the actual recognition and reading level of Chinese learners in the countries of the Chinese character cultural circle,but also facilitates targeted Chinese teaching and selection and compilation of Chinese textbooks.This article takes university students studying Chinese at Hiroshima City University in Japan as the research object,and tests their ability to recognize and read Chinese characters.Firstly,the study selected 200 Chinese characters for the test,and designed test papers with three types of quick reading,literacy,and word recognition,respectively,to test the fluency of recognition and reading,comprehensive literacy,and ability to read characters and words.The test papers are all written by E-prime software,and the computer presents the test tasks,while recording their accuracy and response time in detail.Through the collation of the test results and the horizontal and vertical comparative analysis,the results show that: in the fast naming link,the average correct rate and average response time are proportional to the three fast naming tests,and the fluency in recognizing and reading simple Chinese characters is better.In the amount of literacy test,the average accuracy rate of the test is not high or low,and the comprehensive literacy is not high.In the word recognition test,the recognition accuracy rate is far lower than the first two tests,and the ability to recognize and read words is stronger than the ability to recognize and read words,the vocabulary is low.The accuracy of the second-year students of the International Faculty in the three tests is higher than that of the first-year students of the International Faculty.The biggest gap is the word recognition test.Secondly,based on the test results,it is known that the overall Chinese character recognition and reading accuracy rate of Hiroshima City University in Japan is 58.16%,which is neither high nor low.The overall recognition ability is stronger than the reading ability.According to the discussion of the test results and the analysis of correctly recognized Chinese characters,from an objective point of view,the recurrence rate of Chinese characters and Chinese-Japanese homographs have a greater impact on the correct recognition and reading of Chinese characters by Japanese college students.From a subjective point of view,there is also an obvious correlation between students’ learning motivation and the correct rate of Chinese character recognition and reading.Through the analysis of the incorrectly recognized Chinese characters,it is found that the students’ pronunciation errors mainly focus on the negative transfer of the mother tongue,the errors in the recognition and reading due to the same or similar meanings,and polyphonic characters.Finally,on the basis of the previous research,the corresponding enlightenment is obtained from three sides: teacher teaching,student acquisition,and textbook compilation.Teachers should attach great importance to pronunciation teaching,classification breakthroughs,etc.Japanese students should pay attention to word practice,clever use of methods,etc.in acquiring Chinese characters.Teaching materials should be targeted and so on.This research is an tentative research on the recognition and reading of Chinese characters.It opens a new field of research on the recognition and reading level of Chinese characters in Chinese as a foreign language.It is hoped that it will pave the way for future research.Through the empirical research on the Chinese character recognition ability of Japanese college students,I hope to bring some help and reference to Japanese Chinese teachers and Japanese college students who learn Chinese.