Some Characteristic Errors in Learning Japanese Hiragana Characters Among Foreign Students According to Different Nationalities: In the Case of Spanish, English, Chinese and Indonesian Speakers

Abstract

In the learning of a foreign language, some linguistic aspects of the learner’s mother tongue may interfere. They can be phonetic, morphosyntactic or lexical, among others. In the learning process of Hiragana in Mexican students, we have observed a quite marked tendency to fall into certain errors or confusions. Kishi (2013) states that there are two types of confusions: morphological and analogical. Hence comes the question of whether these characteristics are universal in all languages or variable according to the mother tongue.
Therefore, our goal is to comparatively investigate the linguistic behavior in Hiragana learning of Japanese language students from Spanish, English, Chinese and Indonesian speaking countries. The methodology used is mixed, since it consists of qualitative analysis based on our observations, as well as quantitative research, the corpus of which was obtained through surveys conducted at universities in Japan.

This work is based in the paper of the autor "Errores comunes en el aprendizaje de hiragana segun la nacionalidad" presented on the frame of the First Internatioonal Seminary about Japan Studies, realized on november 6^th and 7^th, 2017 in the Public Library of Jalisco.