The purpose of this study is to research the pattern of instances in which the first person pronoun “watashi” is used overtly or dropped, and based on these findings, to suggest a specific method for teaching learners to use “watashi” properly. In con ...
The purpose of this study is to research the pattern of instances in which the first person pronoun “watashi” is used overtly or dropped, and based on these findings, to suggest a specific method for teaching learners to use “watashi” properly. In contrast to the case of Western languages, in Korean or Japanese, kinship nouns or nouns referring to one’s job position is often used to refer to a person. Also, in contrast to English, in which the grammatical subject is not omitted from a sentence, Korean or Japanese allow the omission of the subject or object. Since the usage conventions for such personal nouns are quite similar in Japanese and Korean, there have not been many studies in the fields of Japanese language education or grammar that focused on personal pronouns. This is probably because acquisition of the usage of personal nouns has not been considered difficult compared to the acquisition of grammatical items or vocabulary for Korean learners of Japanese. In spite of this perception, however, a close observation of the discourse of Korean learners of Japanese easily reveals that they are prone to use personal nouns, in particular first person pronouns, with excessive frequency. The excessive usage of the first person pronoun creates an unnatural, and therefore unfavorable impression to the listener, and depending on the situation, may be an expression that constitutes a significant faux pas in relation to the addressee. This study focuses on the first person pronoun “watashi” as an example of such expressions to research the pattern of instances in which “watashi” is used explicitly or dropped.
The KY Corpus, which documents the results of OPI(Oral Proficiency Interview) tests, was used as the raw data for researching the use of first person pronouns by Korean learners of the Japanese language. The results indicated that 30 Korean learners included in the data used “watashi” a total of 382 times. Since a total number of 138,135 characters were used by the 30 examinees, a simple calculation demonstrates that Korean learners were using “watashi” on average once every 237 characters.
Based on this average, I proceeded to examine the usage of “watashi” at each level of Japanese proficiency. The results indicated that among Novice and Intermediate level learners, the learners who used “watashi” frequently and those who used it less were distributed evenly. However, within the Advanced level, there was a distinct difference between the “Advanced level” and “advanced level-high” learners. Advanced level learners were used “watashi” more often than the average, and expressed themselves in an awkward style of Japanese that resembled a direct translation of Korean into Japanese. By contrast, learners at the “advanced level-high” and “Superior level” used “watashi” less than average and only in usage situations similar to the manner of Japanese native speakers and therefore did not create a sense of incongruity.
These research results indicated that advanced level learners of Japanese would benefit from being taught how to omit “watashi” in predictable instances.