LibGuides: Modern Languages: Japanese

Online Resources

Japanese Japanese ranks as the ninth most widely spoken language of the world with more than 127 million speakers in the island state of Japan. Its genetic relation has been a topic of heated discussion, but Altaic and Austronesian languages appear to have contributed to the early formation of this language. Japanese has a long written tradition, which goes back to texts from the eighth century CE. The modern writing system employs a mixture of Chinese characters and two sets of syllabary indigenously developed based on the Chinese characters. This book consists of sixteen chapters covering the phonology, morphology, writing system, tense and aspect systems, basic argument structure, grammatical constructions, and discourse and pragmatic phenomena of Japanese. It provides researchers with a useful typological reference and students of Japanese with a theory-neutral introduction to current linguistic research issues.
Loanwords in Japanese Loanwords in Japanese is the first monograph in a Western language to offer a systematic and coherent overview of the vast number of words borrowed into Japanese since the mid-16th century. Its publication is timely given the fact that the loanword stratumâe(tm)s recent exponential growth has given rise to recent Japanese government publications seeking to outlaw foreign vocabulary or, at the very least, offer native translations. Beginning with a history of loanwords, chapters cover loanword phonology, loanword morphology, loanword orthography and official and public attitudes to Japanese loanwords. The volume will be of interest to a wide range of researchers, scholars and students of the Japanese language.
Remembering the Kanji Students who have learned to read and write the basic 2,000 characters run into the same difficulty that university students in Japan face: The government-approved list of basic educational kanji is not sufficient for advanced reading and writing. Although each academic specialization requires supplementary kanji of its own, a large number of these kanji overlap. With that in mind, the same methods employed in volumes 1 and 2 of Remembering the Kanji have been applied to 1,000 additional characters determined as useful for upper-level proficiency, and the results published as the third volume in the series. To identify the extra 1,000 characters, frequency lists were researched and cross-checked against a number of standard Japanese kanji dictionaries. Separate parts of the book are devoted to learning the writing and reading of these characters. The writing requires only a handful of new "primitive elements." A few are introduced as compound primitives ("measure words") or as alternative forms for standard kanji. The majority of the kanji, 735 in all, are organized according to the elements introduced in Volume 1. For the reading, about twenty-five percent of the new kanji fall into "pure groups" that use a single "signal primitive" to identify the main Chinese reading. Another thirty percent of the new kanji belong to groups with one exception or to mixed groups in which the signal primitives have two readings. The remaining 306 characters are organized first according to readings that can be intuited from the meaning or dominant primitive element, and then according to useful compound terms.

Journals Of Interest

Electronic journal of contemporary Japanese studies
ejcjs is an international academic journal in the Social Sciences and Humanities that publishes research and scholarly writing on all issues related to contemporary Japan. The journal adopts a multi-disciplinary stance in the hope that it will contribute to a deeper understanding of Japan and Japanese people and that it will, consequently, enrich our understanding of the totality of human experience
Japanese language and literature
Dedicated to teaching & scholarship & to the exchange of information among teachers & other professionsal to help broaden & deepen knowledge and appreciation of Japan & its culture.
The Journal of Japanese Studies
The Journal of Japanese Studies is the most influential journal dealing with research on Japan available in the English language. Since 1974, it has published the results of scholarly research on Japan in a wide variety of social science and humanities disciplines, as well as translations of articles from Japanese and substantive book reviews.
Japanese Economy
Concerned with developments in the Japanese economy, and related issues.

Japanese Language Websites

Jim Breen's Dictionary of Japanese
Keiko Schneider's Bookmarks
Collection of links for the study of Japanese
Japanese Language
Online Dictionary.
Project GutenBerg: Japanese
Online text in Japanese.

Modern Languages: Japanese

Additional Resources

Online Resources

Journals Of Interest

Japanese Language Websites