文档介绍：A STUDY OF JAPANESE IDIOMS FOR LEARNERS
AND TEACHERS OF JAPANESE
- A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH TO MAKING A
JAPANESE IDIOM REFERENCE -
By
Danny MINN
5300215
Asian Studies I
Graduate School of Area and Culture Studies
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
January 10, 2002
Abstract 1
Abstract
For learners of a foreign language, there are many tasks to handle, such as
learning and remembering a writing system, pronunciation, vocabulary, mor-
phology, grammar, sentence structure, etc. Each factor has its own range of
difficulty-levels and learning timing. Within the areas of vocabulary acquisi-
tion and sentence structure is the difficult task of learning idioms. It is usually
reserved for intermediate- to advanced-level learners. The main reason for this
is that idioms are expressions, which are made up of two or more words that
denote a meaning that may be unrelated to the meanings of the individual
words. In other words, they are hard to understand from the point of view
of position. Because the burden on memorization is so heavy, the
learning of pletely can be very inefficient and time-consuming.
In order to lessen the burden on memorization and to learn idioms more
efficiently and effectively, learners of Japanese would benefit from concentrat-
ing on the idioms that are actually used most frequently in Japanese. When
learning idioms, learners of Japanese should start with the high frequency ones
and reserve low frequency ones for later. For this purpose, a ranking of idioms
by their frequency of use would be beneficial. Furthermore, because idiomatic
usage may differ according to genre, a ranking of idioms within specific genres
would also contribute to the efficient study of idioms.
This thesis will discuss an investigation of the frequency distribution of id-
ioms in the literary and newspaper genres. Large bodies of digitized Japanese
text or corpora puter programs were used in this research. The cur-
rently availa