L2 learners' attitudes toward, and use of, mnemonic strategies when learning Japanese kanji

Abstract

This study investigated kanji learning (the memorization of Japanese written characters) of university students of Japanese, in order to evaluate students' use of mnemonic strategies. The study applied in‐depth qualitative methods to broaden the understanding of how foreign language learners use mnemonics when learning kanji. Data were collected over the duration of a year in the form of interviews, stimulated recall sessions, and a questionnaire on mnemonic usage. The study found that while mnemonics are useful to memorize kanji and kanji components when applied in a meaningful way, an overreliance on this strategy can have negative effects for the learner. The study highlighted numerous accounts of the meaning of a kanji being lost in overly complex mnemonic strategies. Another limitation of mnemonic strategies was associations being made with the meaning of kanji and not with how it was read, causing an inability to read kanji in Japanese.

Indonesian students’ perceptions of mnemonics strategies to recognize Japanese kanji characters

“…The intervention implementation of mnemonic strategies The study began by identifying various contradictory findings regarding to the benefits of mnemonic strategies in the learning of Kanji and continued to explore the use of mnemonic strategies as reported in previous studies, which tended to be quasi-experimental or survey designs (Rose, 2013). Therefore, mnemonic strategies were a pedagogical intervention implemented in two classes of first-year students in the Department of Japanese Language Education at a state university in Indonesia.…”

Introduction

“…It is widely documented that foreign language learners struggle to master logographic scripts, particularly if their first language's script is alphabetic (Toyoda 1998(Toyoda , 2000Toyoda and Kubota 2001). It has been sug gested that students of these languages need assistance to overcome the barrier to literacy that kanji and hanzi create (Rose 2003(Rose , 2013.…”

The trends and developments of L2 Japanese research in the 2010s

“…Coping with visual complexity is another area of interest as it is a major inhibitory factor for character reproduction, particularly for non-kanji background learners (e.g., Taniguchi, 2017). Strategies under investigation include mnemonics (i.e., memory-enhancing strategies) (Toyoda & McNamara, 2011; Soemer & Schwan, 2012; Rose, 2013) and rote learning such as repeated writing (Tsukada, 2012) and air writing (i.e., spontaneous production of highly articulated movements of the fingertips or hands while tracing out abstract representations of kanji, or character components) (Thomas, 2013, 2014, 2015). Studies on mnemonics through the use of personal encoding techniques, or mental images of the items to be learned, for instance, have not reached researchers’ consensus on their effectiveness.…”

“…In addition, L2 word recognition and processing operate a qualitatively different mechanism from that of L1 word identification, requiring increased cognitive resources for orthographic, semantic, and phonological retrieval (e.g., Fukuta, 2013; Koyama, Stein, Stoodley, & Hansen, 2013; Nakayama, Ida, & Lupker, 2016). Consequently, post-2010 studies continued to investigate a range of issues in learning kanji from various perspectives including crosslinguistic influence (Matsumoto, 2013; Hagiwara, 2016), the role of L2 proficiency (Toyoda & McNamara, 2011; Matsumoto, 2013), linguistic factors affecting L2 kanji recognition and production (Fei & Matsumi, 2013; Toyoda, Firdaus, & Kano, 2013; Taniguchi, 2017), learning strategies and attitudes (Soemer & Schwan, 2012; Rose, 2013; Thomas, 2013, 2014, 2015; Tsukada, 2012; Kubota, 2017), and instructional interventions (Ulambayar, 2013).…”