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(★)(新装版 増えて使えるヴォキャブラリー)(Having grasped the rudiments of Japanese grammar, what the students needs next are more words, more phrases, more turns of phrase. In short, more ways to get across the ideas that can be expressed so easily in English but for which the student simply doesn´t have the requisite Japanese vocabulary.／ One answer to this problem is found in ´affixes --nifty little prefixes and suffixes´, written with a single kanji, that can be attached to ordinary words to create new ones. They function much like Latin-derived prefixes and suffixes do in English. Just as you can attach ´anti-´ to almost any noun to create a new one (e.g., anti-American), you can attach its Japanese equivalent in the same way (e.g., han-amerika). Once you know this, you can ´anti´ and han yourself left and right and, for the most part, be understood.／ Thus, without going through the laborious process of slowly acquiring these useful affixes through many hours of reading, you can quickly build a larger vocabulary and expand your range of speech. Even for those who are able to read kanji, this is a great time saver, and for those whose kanji is rather minimal, it provides a means of picking up words that would ordinarily be far beyond their reach.／ In short, it is as though you only knew the word ´simple´ and then one day acquired ´simplify´,´simplistic´, and ´simpleton´. And, perhaps more importantly, the approach allows you not only to learn words that are in the dictionaries but to actually create new words to suit what you want to say, just as you can in English.／ ◆Timothy J. Vance is professor and department head of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. He is author of ´An Introduction to Japanese Phonology (Suny Series in Linguistics, 1988)´.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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